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Dynamic Response: Real-Time Adaptation for Music Emotion

Livingstone, Steven R. and Brown, Andrew R. (2005) Dynamic Response: Real-Time Adaptation for Music Emotion. In Proceedings Second Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment 123, pages pp. 105-111, Sydney.

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Abstract

Music plays an enormous role in today's computer games; it serves to elicit emotion, generate interest and convey important information. Traditional gaming music is fixed at the event level, where tracks loop until a state change is triggered. This behaviour however does not reflect musically the in-game state between these events. We propose a dynamic music environment, where music tracks adjust in real-time to the emotion of the in game state. We are looking to improve the affective response to symbolic music through the modification of structural and performative characteristics through the application of rule-based techniques. In this paper we undertake a multidiscipline approach, and present a series of primary music-emotion structural rules for implementation. The validity of these rules was tested in small study involving eleven participants, each listening to six permutations from two musical works. Preliminary results indicate that the environment was generally successful in influencing the emotion of the musical works for three of the intended four directions (happy, sad and content/dreamy). Our secondary aim of establishing that the use of music-emotion rules, sourced predominantly from Western classical music, could be applied with comparable results to modern computer gaming music was also generally successfully.

Item Type:Conference Paper
Status:Published
Subjects:410000 The Arts > 410100 Performing Arts > 410101 Music
ID Code:9525
Deposited By:Brown, Andrew
Deposited On:17 September 2007
Alternative Locations:http://www.creativityandcognition.com/, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109180.1109196
Copyright Owner:Copyright 2005 (The authors)