A cross-cultural study of mood in K-POP Songs

Prior research suggests that music mood is one of the most important criteria when people look for music – but the perception of mood may be subjective and can be influenced by many factors including the listeners’ cultural background. In recent years, the number of studies of music mood perceptions by various cultural groups and of automated mood classification of music from different cultures has been increasing. However, there has yet to be a well-established testbed for evaluating cross-cultural tasks in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Moreover, most existing datasets in MIR consist mainly of Western music and the cultural backgrounds of the annotators were mostly not taken into consideration or were limited to one cultural group. In this study, we built a collection of 1,892 K-pop (Korean Pop) songs with mood annotations collected from both Korean and American listeners, based on three different mood models. We analyze the differences and similarities between the mood judgments of the two listener groups, and propose potential MIR tasks that can be evaluated on this dataset. © Xiao Hu, Jin Ha Lee, Kahyun Choi, J. Stephen Downie.published_or_final_versio

Measuring Cultural Relativity of Emotional Valence and Arousal using Semantic Clustering and Twitter

Researchers since at least Darwin have debated whether and to what extent emotions are universal or culture-dependent. However, previous studies have primarily focused on facial expressions and on a limited set of emotions. Given that emotions have a substantial impact on human lives, evidence for cultural emotional relativity might be derived by applying distributional semantics techniques to a text corpus of self-reported behaviour. Here, we explore this idea by measuring the valence and arousal of the twelve most popular emotion keywords expressed on the micro-blogging site Twitter. We do this in three geographical regions: Europe, Asia and North America. We demonstrate that in our sample, the valence and arousal levels of the same emotion keywords differ significantly with respect to these geographical regions — Europeans are, or at least present themselves as more positive and aroused, North Americans are more negative and Asians appear to be more positive but less aroused when compared to global valence and arousal levels of the same emotion keywords. Our work is the first in kind to programatically map large text corpora to a dimensional model of affect

Proposta de uso de estado emocional do indivíduo na automação de ambiente inteligente

A questão de pesquisa que este estudo pretende abordar visa melhorar a qualidade de vida dos usuários, especialmente os portadores de necessidades especiais, adaptando o ambiente ao seu conforto emocional. Nesse contexto, o objetivo da presente pesquisa é a elaboração de um ambiente inteligente controlado passivamente através do estado emocional do usuário, utilizando interface cérebro computador. De forma geral, espera-se com este estudo ser capaz de adaptar um sistema inteligente de acordo com a emoção objetivo, visando o aumentando do rendimento do indivíduo numa dada tarefa, auxiliando em tratamentos terapêuticos ou aumentando o seu conforto. Para validação do trabalho foi utilizada a interface cérebrocomputador da empresa Emotiv com o sistema de automação predial-residencial da empresa Home Systems, utilizando algoritmo genético para buscar a configuração adequada do ambiente tendo o nível de atenção como emoção objetivo. Os resultados preliminares dos nove testes realizados com seis indivíduos comprovam que é viável o controle de ambientes baseado no estado emocional dos usuários. Este trabalho situa-se na interdisciplinaridade de áreas como engenharia elétrica, computação, psicologia comportamental e tecnologias assistivas.The research question that this study aims to approach is to improve the quality of life of individuals with or without special needs, by adapting the environment to their emotional comfort. In this context, the goal of this research is to develop an intelligent system passively controlled trough brain-computer interface. In general, it is expected with this study to be able to adapt a smart environment according to the emotional target, aiming to increase the yield of a given individual task, assisting in therapeutics or increasing the individual’s comfort. In order to validate the experiment, Emotiv’s brain computer interface was used with Home Systems’ home automation system, using genetic algorithm to find the appropriate configuration of the environment and attention level as the emotional target. Preliminary results of the nine tests conducted on six subjects indicate that it is feasible to control a smart environment based on the emotional state of the user. This is an interdisciplinary work in areas such as electrical engineering, computer science, behavioral psychology and assistive technologies