Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Virtual meeting rooms are used for simulation of real meeting behavior and can show how people behave, how they gesture, move their heads, bodies, their gaze behavior during conversations. They are used for visualising models of meeting behavior, and they can be used for the evaluation of these models. They are also used to show the effects of controlling certain parameters on the behavior and in experiments to see what the effect is on communication when various channels of information - speech, gaze, gesture, posture - are switched off or manipulated in other ways. The paper presents the various stages in the development of a virtual meeting room as well and illustrates its uses by presenting some results of experiments to see whether human judges can induce conversational roles in a virtual meeting situation when they only see the head movements of participants in the meeting

The listening room, Camden Arts Centre

This version of The Listening Room is minimal, one microphone and two loudspeakers in the Reading Room of Camden Arts Centre, a relatively small space for this work. The Reading Room is the former entrance to the building, this entrance has been bricked over to create three highly reflective wall surfaces in the room. The room resonance is so pronounced that my usual placement of microphone and speakers would tend to fix on one pitch and stay there - to introduce more of the available frequencies from the space I left the Reading Room table in the space to allow an additional reflective element and used an asymmetric placement of loudspeakers, one at the side and one under the table

Radio and affective rhythm in the everyday

This article explores the role of radio sound in establishing what I term ‘affective rhythms’ in everyday life. Through exploring the affective qualities of radio sound and its capacity for mood generation in the home, this article explores personal affective states and personal organisation. The term affective rhythm relates both to mood, and to routine. It is the combination of both that allows the possibility of thinking about sound and affect, and how they relate to, and integrate with, routine everyday life. The notion of ‘affective rhythm’ forces us to consider the idea of mood in the light of the routine nature of everyday domestic life

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Music as Affective Scaffolding

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture

Toward a model of computational attention based on expressive behavior: applications to cultural heritage scenarios

Our project goals consisted in the development of attention-based analysis of human expressive behavior and the implementation of real-time algorithm in EyesWeb XMI in order to improve naturalness of human-computer interaction and context-based monitoring of human behavior. To this aim, perceptual-model that mimic human attentional processes was developed for expressivity analysis and modeled by entropy. Museum scenarios were selected as an ecological test-bed to elaborate three experiments that focus on visitor profiling and visitors flow regulation

Intimate bodies and technologies: A concept for live-digital dancing

This thesis considers the relationship between dance and digital media, and considers a specific type of case regarding this relationship: live and mediated. My motivation has been to identify and investigate, through practice, some of the difficulties presented when live and mediated bodies are placed within the same performance environment. In order to challenge some of the difficulties of what I consider as the problematic medium of digital dance, this thesis offers an examination of the ways in which digital media can positively transform the processes of making movement, and explores how the assimilation of media, as an integral agent within movement generation, can counter the dominance of the digital. Such dominance has been considered using a Practice As Research (PaR) model, and thus the thesis exemplifies both the creation of, and a deep reflection on, three works: Shift (2010-11), Betwixt & Between (2012-13) and Modulation_one (2013-14). Through the development of these works, I have sought to formally analyze and illuminate how media technologies, and in particular projection, can enrich the processes for making movement. This has been done in the context of a proliferation of digital technologies being available within a studio setting. In particular, the works have been established from the perspective of the dancer, which represents a specific case study for challenging the dominance of the digital. What follows in the written thesis is an analysis of what is a continuing and emerging practice. The written thesis therefore serves as both a document of the process and presents an illustration of a methodological approach for generating synergistic relationships with movement and projection. This relationship is proposed as a concept for live-digital dancing, which represents the main contribution to knowledge. The term live-digital advances the idea that a dancer is neither bound or restricted by either a live or digital construct, rather she is inspired to move and respond, in the moment of performance, to an unfolding assemblage of live and digital materials. Significantly, this has been established through the experiential encounters of the dancer moving with simultaneous projections of self. Live-digital therefore offers a methodological approach for constructing digital dance performance environments, which place perception and experience at the fore

Systematic evaluation of perceived spatial quality

The evaluation of perceived spatial quality calls for a method that is sensitive to changes in the constituent dimensions of that quality. In order to devise a method accounting for these changes, several processes have to be performed. This paper shows the development of scales by elicitation and structuring of verbal data, followed by validation of the resulting attribute scales