Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

BaNa: a noise resilient fundamental frequency detection algorithm for speech and music

Fundamental frequency (F0) is one of the essential features in many acoustic related applications. Although numerous F0 detection algorithms have been developed, the detection accuracy in noisy environments still needs improvement. We present a hybrid noise resilient F0 detection algorithm named BaNa that combines the approaches of harmonic ratios and Cepstrum analysis. A Viterbi algorithm with a cost function is used to identify the F0 value among several F0 candidates. Speech and music databases with eight different types of additive noise are used to evaluate the performance of the BaNa algorithm and several classic and state-of-the-art F0 detection algorithms. Results show that for almost all types of noise and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values investigated, BaNa achieves the lowest Gross Pitch Error (GPE) rate among all the algorithms. Moreover, for the 0 dB SNR scenarios, the BaNa algorithm is shown to achieve 20% to 35% GPE rate for speech and 12% to 39% GPE rate for music. We also describe implementation issues that must be addressed to run the BaNa algorithm as a real-time application on a smartphone platform.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Review of Audio Features and Statistical Models Exploited for Voice Pattern Design

Audio fingerprinting, also named as audio hashing, has been well-known as a powerful technique to perform audio identification and synchronization. It basically involves two major steps: fingerprint (voice pattern) design and matching search. While the first step concerns the derivation of a robust and compact audio signature, the second step usually requires knowledge about database and quick-search algorithms. Though this technique offers a wide range of real-world applications, to the best of the authors' knowledge, a comprehensive survey of existing algorithms appeared more than eight years ago. Thus, in this paper, we present a more up-to-date review and, for emphasizing on the audio signal processing aspect, we focus our state-of-the-art survey on the fingerprint design step for which various audio features and their tractable statistical models are discussed.Comment: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/PATTERNS15.html ; Seventh International Conferences on Pervasive Patterns and Applications (PATTERNS 2015), Mar 2015, Nice, Franc

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