The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music

Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed

The Emotional and Chromatic Layers of Urban Smells

People are able to detect up to 1 trillion odors. Yet, city planning is concerned only with a few bad odors, mainly because odors are currently captured only through complaints made by urban dwellers. To capture both good and bad odors, we resort to a methodology that has been recently proposed and relies on tagging information of geo-referenced pictures. In doing so for the cities of London and Barcelona, this work makes three new contributions. We study 1) how the urban smellscape changes in time and space; 2) which emotions people share at places with specific smells; and 3) what is the color of a smell, if it exists. Without social media data, insights about those three aspects have been difficult to produce in the past, further delaying the creation of urban restorative experiences.Comment: 11 pages, 18 figures, final version published in the Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016

Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

DramaQA: Character-Centered Video Story Understanding with Hierarchical QA

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing video understanding intelligence is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of story in video. Moreover, there is not a theoretical metric for evaluating the degree of video understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focused on two perspectives: 1) hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 16,191 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors, and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we provide analyses of the dataset as well as Dual Matching Multistream model which effectively learns character-centered representations of video to answer questions about the video. We are planning to release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes and expect that our work will provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ECCV 202

Tourist product in experience economy

Przełom XX i XXI w. to rozwoju tzw. gospodarki doznań, w której podstawowym towarem stają się nie konkretne produkty, ale emocje, przeżycia i doświadczenia klientów. Turystyka była i jest swoistym "przemysłem wakacyjnych doświadczeń". W ostatnich latach jednak jeszcze wyraźniej niż do tej pory kładzie się nacisk na świadome kreowanie produktów turystycznych silnie nasyconych emocjami. Usilnie dąży się do multiplikowania oraz intensyfikacji wrażeń turystów. Do najważniejszych działań w tym zakresie zaliczono: przekształcanie infrastruktury turystycznej w unikatowe atrakcje turystyczne, wzbogacanie tradycyjnych usług/pakietów usług o dodatkowe elementy zapewniające dodatkowe doznania i satysfakcje, wykorzystanie nowoczesnych technologii wzbogacania realnej przestrzeni turystycznej o wirtualne byty (rozszerzona rzeczywistość), a także wygodnego zapisywania doświadczeń turystycznych oraz dzielenia się wrażeniami z masową publicznością.The turn of the 20th and 21st c. was marked by the development of experience economy, in which the basic commodities are not specific products, but the customers' emotions, impressions and experiences. Tourism has always been a particular "holiday experience industry". In recent years, however, the importance of the conscious creation of emotional tourist products has become even greater, we may observe continuous efforts to multiply and intensify tourism experience. The key activities to achieve this goal include transforming tourism infrastructure into unique tourism attractions, enlarging traditional services/service packages by elements providing additional emotions and satisfaction, using modern technologies in order to add virtual entities to real tourism space (augmented reality), as well as to conveniently record tourism experience and share it with the public

ELVIS: Entertainment-led video summaries

© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 6(3): Article no. 17 (2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1823746.1823751Video summaries present the user with a condensed and succinct representation of the content of a video stream. Usually this is achieved by attaching degrees of importance to low-level image, audio and text features. However, video content elicits strong and measurable physiological responses in the user, which are potentially rich indicators of what video content is memorable to or emotionally engaging for an individual user. This article proposes a technique that exploits such physiological responses to a given video stream by a given user to produce Entertainment-Led VIdeo Summaries (ELVIS). ELVIS is made up of five analysis phases which correspond to the analyses of five physiological response measures: electro-dermal response (EDR), heart rate (HR), blood volume pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RR), and respiration amplitude (RA). Through these analyses, the temporal locations of the most entertaining video subsegments, as they occur within the video stream as a whole, are automatically identified. The effectiveness of the ELVIS technique is verified through a statistical analysis of data collected during a set of user trials. Our results show that ELVIS is more consistent than RANDOM, EDR, HR, BVP, RR and RA selections in identifying the most entertaining video subsegments for content in the comedy, horror/comedy, and horror genres. Subjective user reports also reveal that ELVIS video summaries are comparatively easy to understand, enjoyable, and informative

Environmental Changes and the Dynamics of Musical Identity

Musical tastes reflect our unique values and experiences, our relationships with others, and the places where we live. But as each of these things changes, do our tastes also change to reflect the present, or remain fixed, reflecting our past? Here, we investigate how where a person lives shapes their musical preferences, using geographic relocation to construct quasi-natural experiments that measure short- and long-term effects. Analyzing comprehensive data on over 16 million users on Spotify, we show that relocation within the United States has only a small impact on individuals' tastes, which remain more similar to those of their past environments. We then show that the age gap between a person and the music they consume indicates that adolescence, and likely their environment during these years, shapes their lifelong musical tastes. Our results demonstrate the robustness of individuals' musical identity, and shed new light on the development of preferences.Comment: Accepted to be published at ICWSM'1

Philosophy of Music Education

A philosophy of music education refers to the value of music, the value of teaching music, and how to practically utilize those values in the music classroom. This thesis explores the philosophies of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, Zoltan Kodaly, Bennett Reimer, and David Elliott, and suggests practical applications or their philosophies in the orchestral classroom, especially in the context of ear training and improvisation. From these philosophies, the author develops their own personal philosophy of music education, most broadly defined by the claim that music is key to experiencing and understanding feelingful experiences