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Italian Institute of Culture "C.M. Lerici", Stockholm, 1999.03.10
The Art of Automatic Music Performance:
Synthesis of Emotional Expression in Piano Music
(Abstracts in English, Italian and Swedish)
Roberto Bresin
Department of Speech Music & Hearing (TMH)
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) - Stockholm
Listening test
During the seminar at the Italian Institute of Culture in Stockholm a forced choice listening test was carried
out where listeners of the public were asked to classify the performances of a melody according to seven emotional
alternatives. 15 people did the test.
The piece of music used for the test was the melody line of a Swedish nursery tune (Ekorrn satt i granen, henceforth
Ekorrn, "The squirrel sat
on the fir-tree", composed by Tegner) written in major tonality.
Subjects were instructed to identify the emotional expression of each example of Ekorrn
as one out of seven alternative substantives: fear, anger, happiness,
sadness, solemnity, tenderness, no-expression. The responses were automatically written on a form that was previuosly
given to all the people in the public (click here to download a copy of the form in Word format)
The subjects listened to the stimuli over the loudspeakers in the seminar room.
The order of the performances was the following:
- No-expression (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Sadness (MIDI file, Sound
file)
- Happiness (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Tenderness (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Anger (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Fear (MIDI file , Sound file)
- Solemnity (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Sadness (MIDI file, Sound file)
- Happiness (MIDI file, Sound file)
- No-expression (MIDI file, Sound file)
The average duration of the experiment was approximately 5 minutes.
Data obtained from the listening test were analized and
the results are partly summerized in the confusion matrix inTable 1:
Table 1 Confusion matrix (%) for the
classification test of seven synthesized performances of Ekorrn. 15 subjects.
| |
Classified Emotion
|
|
Intended Emotion
|
TENDERNESS
|
ANGER
|
FEAR
|
SOLEMNITY
|
SADNESS
|
HAPPINESS
|
NO EXPRESSION
|
|
TENDERNESS
|
33
|
0
|
7
|
20
|
13
|
0
|
27
|
|
ANGER
|
0
|
80
|
0
|
13
|
0
|
7
|
0
|
|
FEAR
|
13
|
0
|
33
|
7
|
33
|
0
|
14
|
|
SOLEMNITY
|
0
|
0
|
7
|
53
|
0
|
0
|
40
|
|
SADNESS
|
47
|
0
|
20
|
6
|
27
|
0
|
0
|
|
HAPPINESS
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
73
|
27
|
|
NO EXPRESSION
|
0
|
7
|
6
|
7
|
0
|
7
|
73
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© Roberto
Bresin - Last update: 1999.07.12
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