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Authors:

R. Michael Winters, Marcelo M. Wanderley

Publication or Conference Title:

Organised Sound

Abstract:

Emotion is a word not often heard in sonification, though advances in affective computing make the data type imminent. At times the relationship between emotion and sonification has been contentious due to an implied overlap with music. This paper clarifies the relationship, demonstrating how it can be mutually beneficial. After identifying contexts favourable to auditory display of emotion, and the utility of its development to research in musical emotion, the current state of the field is addressed, reiterating the necessary conditions for sound to qualify as a sonification of emotion. With this framework, strategies for display are presented that use acoustic and structural cues designed to target select auditory-cognitive mechanisms of musical emotion. Two sonifications are then described using these strategies to convey arousal and valence though differing in design methodology: one designed ecologically, the other computationally. Each model is sampled at 15-second intervals at 49 evenly distributed points on the AV space, and evaluated using a publically available tool for computational music emotion recognition. The computational design performed 65 times better in this test, but the ecological design is argued to be more useful for emotional communication. Conscious of these limitations, computational design and evaluation is supported for future development.

Publication Details:

Type:	Journal Paper
Date:	04/01/2014
Volume:	19(1)
Pages:	60–69
Location:	Cambridge University Press
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771813000411

IDMIL Participants:

• Marcelo M. Wanderley