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Dr Steven R. Livingstone | |
| Postdoctoral Fellow Steven.Livingstone@mcgill.ca Sequence Production Lab Department of Psychology McGill University 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada |
PhD Thesis - Changing Musical Emotion through Score and Performance with a Computational Rule System
In my dissertation I present CMERS - a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the control of perceived musical emotions - that modifies a musical work at the levels of score and performance in real-time. I researched, designed, programmed, and tested CMERS, which handles all modifications to the musical work. CMERS achieves a change in perceived musical emotion through the application of music-emotion rules; these rules quantify the empirically observed relations between musical features and specific emotions (for example, major mode ≈ happy, minor mode ≈ sad). Employing a 2-dimensional representation of emotion (seen below), CMERS was shown in testing to be successful in changing the perceived emotion of all selected music works to each of the four emotion space quadrants, referred to loosely as happy, angry, sad, and tender, with a mean accuracy of 78% and a multinomial logistic regression analysis of Χ2(9) = 11183.0, p < 0.0005 (N = 20).A Computational Music-Emotion Rule System operating at the levels of score and performance, with automated expressive performance features, provides researchers with a powerful tool for exploring emotional relationships within music. CMERS ability to isolate individual structural, performance, and expressive performance elements, provides researchers with a precise and extensible platform from which to examine the contributions and conflating behaviour of specific features to musical emotion. CMERS real-time emotion modification capability, automated expressive performance, and simple emotion message format, allows for its use as a computer gaming music-emotion engine, in addition to a multitude of other real-time application environments.
Research Interests
- Music psychology
- Music and emotion
- Amusia and speech prosody
- Music performance and motion capture
- Evolutionary music origins
Publications
Book Chapters
- Livingstone, S. R., & Thompson, W. F. (2009). L'apparition de la musique de la théorie d'esprit. In Marc Richelle & Xavier Seron (Eds.). Musique et Evolution. Belgium: Pierre MARDAGA Press. In press.
Journal Papers
- Livingstone, S.R., Thompson, W.F., & Russo, F. A. (2009). Facial expressions and emotional singing: A study of perception and production with motion capture and electromyography. Music Perception, invited paper.
- Livingstone, S. R. & Thompson, W. F. (2009). The emergence of music from the Theory of Mind. To appear in Musicae Scientiae (Special Issue on Music and Evolution, Eds. O. Vitouch & O. Ladinig), in press. Download PDF (postprint).
- Livingstone, S. R., Muhlberger, R., Brown, A. R., & Loch, A. (2007). Controlling Musical Emotionality: An Affective Computational Architecture for Influencing Musical Emotion. Digital Creativity, 18. Download PDF (postprint).
- Livingstone, S. R. & Thompson, W. F. (2006). Multi-modal affective interaction: A comment on musical origins. Music Perception, 24, 89-94. Download PDF.
Conference Papers
- Livingstone, S. R., Brown, A. R., Muhlberger, R. (2005). Influencing the Perceived Emotions of Music with Intent. Third International Conference on Generative Systems. Download PDF.
- Livingstone, S. R. & Brown, A. R. (2005). Dynamic Response: Real-Time Adaptation for Music Emotion. Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. Download PDF.
- Livingstone, S. R., Muhlberger, R., Brown, A. R. (2005). Playing with Affect: Music Performance with Awareness of Score and Audience. Australasian Computer Music Conference. Download PDF.
- Henricksen, K. Livingstone, S. R., Indulska, J. (2004). Towards a hybrid approach to context modelling, reasoning and interoperation. Ubicomp’2004, First International Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning And Management. Download PDF.
Workshop Papers
- Livingstone, S. R., Muhlberger, R., Brown, A. R. (2006). Influencing Perceived Musical Emotions: The Importance of Performative and Structural Aspects in a Rule System. Music as Human Communication: An HCSNet Workshop on the Science of Music Perception, Performance and Cognition. Download PDF.
- Livingstone, S. R., Muhlberger, R., Brown, A. R. (2006). Music, Speech and a Theory of Mind: Investigations with a Computational Model of Musical Emotions. HCSNet Workshop on Human and Machine Speech. Download PDF.
- Livingstone, S. R., Muhlberger, R., Brown, A. R. (2006). The Music-Emotion Lifecycle. HCSNet Workshop on Perception and Action.
Other
- Livingstone, S. R. (2003). Service Discovery in Pervasive Systems. Unpublished honours thesis, winner of the DSTC industry prize. Download PDF.
Latest News
- 20/10/2008 - ** NEW JOB** I began my new position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Sequence Production Lab at McGill University, Canada. My work will continue to focus on music cognition.
- 01/09/2007 - PhD testing results a success. Processing of final PhD testing results indicate that my computational system for influencing perceived musical emotions was highly effective. In statistical terms, the effects were highly significant, p<0.0005
- <09/07/2007 - ** NEW JOB** On Monday I begin my new position as a post-doctoral researcher at Macquarie University in the area of music psychology. Thesis is close to completion, and I will be working as an RA until submission.
- 29/05/2007 - My submission to the Musicae Scientiae Special Edition on The Origins of Music was officially accepted today. While there is work to be done, the contribution was noted for its originality. Given Bill and I are both new comers to the field this is an excellent result for such a large paper.
- 27/10/2006 - Today my latest submission "An affective architecture for musical emotions: Dynamic modification of score, performance and audio" was accepted by the journal Digital Creativity. The editors noted that given the quality and quantity of submissions, a book has been proposed. My paper may now feature as a chapter in this upcoming work.
- 26/10/2006 - Work continues on our Musicae Scientiae submission, with the paper beginning to take shape. My co-author feels it will really "ruffle some feathers", lets hope it does so in a good way.
- 22/09/2006 - Today I was awarded a Graduate School Research Travel Grant, enabling me to travel to Sweden to meet with Anders Friberg and the rest of the group. I also plan to visit Olivier Lartillot's group over in Jyväskylä, Finland, and other academic institutions in Scandanavia.
- 20/06/2006 - My foray into the realm of music psychology proved successful today with the acceptance of our paper to the journal Music Perception (see below).
- 06/12/2005 - I have recently returned from the Third International conference on Generative Arts and the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. The two papers I presented can be found in the publications section. I will soon add a demonstration page with sound samples produced by the latest code release.
Previous Tutoring Duties
- Semester 1, 2004
- COMP1500 - Introduction to Programming/Software Engineering
- Semester 2, 2004
- COMS3200 - Computer Networks I (Ipswich)
Education
- Bachelor of Information Technology, Honours (I), 2001-2003
- Bachelor of Science, Physics, 1998-2000
Recent Awards
- UQ Graduate School Research Travel Grant
- DSTC award for outstanding student honours thesis, 2003.
- Four Dean’s commendation for High Achievement