Emotion in Motion: A Reimagined Framework for Biomusical/Emotional Interaction

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Date
2015
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Volume Title
Publisher
NIME
Abstract

Over the past four years Emotion in Motion, a long running experiment, has amassed the world’s largest database of human physiology associated with emotion in response to the presentation of various selections of musical works. What began as a doctoral research study of participants in Dublin, Ireland, and New York City has grown to include over ten thousand emotional responses to musical experiences from participants across the world, from new installations in Norway, Singapore, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The most recent iteration of Emotion in Motion is currently underway in Taipei City, Taiwan. Preparation for this installation gave the authors an opportunity to reimagine the architecture of Emotion in Motion, allowing for a wider range of potential applications than were originally possible with the initial development of the tools that drive the experiment. Now more than an experiment, Emotion in Motion is a framework for developing myriad emotional/ musical/biomusical interactions with co-located or remote participants. This paper describes the development of this flexible, open-source framework and includes discussion of its various components: hardware agnostic sensor inputs, refined physiological signal processing tools, a public database of data collected during various instantiations of applications built on the framework, and the web application frontend and backend. We also discuss our ongoing work with this tool, and provide the reader with other potential applications that they might realize in using Emotion in Motion.

Description
Keywords
Experiment design, interaction design, biosignals, affective computing, music and emotion
Citation