The Body As Mediator Of Music In The Emotion Light (original) (raw)
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Music as a mediator of Emotion
This paper describes the development of the Emotion Light, an interactive biofeedback artwork where the user listens to electronic music that is composed to calm the user down. The viewer can see a visual reflection of their bodily response by holding a sculptural light that tracks the user's galvanic skin response and heart rate and translates these into changing light patterns that emerge from the sculpture. After an introduction into the principle of biofeedback, the hardware and software developed for this project are described and the work is briefly evaluated through a review of informal interviews held with users of the Emotion Light.
Metaphone: An Artistic Exploration of Biofeedback and Machine Aesthetics
CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems on - CHI EA '13, 2013
ABSTRACT The Metaphone is an interactive art piece that transforms biosensor data extracted from participants into colorful, evocative perceivable visual patterns on a big canvas. The biosensors register movement, pulse and skin conductance, the latter two relating to emotional arousal. The machine creates a traditional art form colorful paintings which can be contrasted with the pulsating, living body of the participants and the machine-like movements of the Metaphone. Participants interacting with the machine get their own painting drawn for them a highly involving activity spurring a whole range of questions around bio-sensing technologies. The participants engaging with Metaphone have to agree to share their personal data, thereby expanding the interactive discourse while questioning the extension of the body with the machine and involving participants with public exposition of their inner worlds.
Projecting Heartbeats: Participant Experiences of a Pulse Responsive Artwork
Western culture’s current obsession with the external form of the human body and instrumental application of biosensing technologies is being challenged by some artworks. This paper explores one such work. ‘Membrane’ is an interactive pulse-sensing installation that draws attention to our inner bodily processes, probing affective entanglements and the permeability of our personal barriers. The artwork mines human bodies to extract the heartbeats of participants. It relies on contact-free technology to covertly measure this intimate rhythm of life. Real time changes in the participant’s heart rate are made publicly perceivable; sonic representations of the changing rhythm are amplified and a live video feed of the participant is manipulated and projected. The installation offers new ways of relating to and critically engaging with a technology that has been promoted as the solution to perceived health, safety, and security problems; it is a playful laboratory that provokes perceptual enquiries, social interactions, and experiences of embodied exploration. The work places the curious centre stage, turns the spotlight on affect, and locates the passer-by as witness and collaborator. A number of participants who engaged with Membrane offered their experience of encountering the artwork. Their reflections pull focus on what comes to matter in our entanglements with biosensing installations.
Music for Flesh II: informing interactive music performance with the viscerality of the body system
Proceedings of the Conference on New Interface for Musical Expression (NIME-12), 2012
Performing music with a computer and loudspeakers represents always a challenge. The lack of a traditional instrument requires the performer to study idiomatic strategies by which musicianship becomes apparent. On the other hand, the audience needs to decode those strategies, so to achieve an understanding and appreciation of the music being played. The issue is particularly relevant to the performance of music that results from the mediation between biological signals of the human body and physical performance. The present article tackles this concern by demonstrating a new model of musical performance; what I define biophysical music. This is music generated and played in real time by amplifying and processing the acoustic sound of a performer’s muscle contractions. The model relies on an original and open source technology made of custom biosensors and a related software framework. The succesfull application of these tools is discussed in the practical context of a solo piece for sensors, laptop and loudspeakers. Eventually, the compositional strategies that characterize the piece are discussed along with a systematic description of the relevant mapping techniques and their sonic outcome.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Touch and Go) , 2012
Think about your body. Consider its capability of channeling articulate information with a single gaze, the dramatic force of a gesture propulsed by muscle tissue contractions, the sympathetic rhythmic changes in the heartbeat when listening to someone else’s palpitations, the meaningful shifting patterns of the brain wave cycles when drifting from relaxation to heightened mental activity. These are nothing but physiological and intimate processes that become externalized to affect the people and the space surrounding us. Once tangible, those processes can be captured, observed, strumentalized or augmented through technology, and become therefore informative (or shall we say informatic) media that are biological in nature. In contemporary electronic music performance this paradigm has exposed creative strategies that had been overlooked so far. This article places the biological media in the ‘broken ground’ where body and computational system interact musically with each other. It questions and defines the qualities of a gesture in the context of biologically sensitive musical instruments, providing therefore a framework to introduce a visceral model of electronic music performance; one in which the sonic matter incarnated within the tissues of the body rises and breaks through the skin to become tangible and shared experience
Physicality and Feedback: A Focus on the Body in the Performance of Electronic Music
Proceedings of the International …, 2001
Musical performance in a cultural context has always been inextricably linked to the human body, yet, the body has played only a minor role in the creation and performance of electronic music. This paper will consider aesthetic and technical issues relating to: (1) the social/cultural construction of contexts for chamber music and dance; (2) our construction of gestural "composed instruments" and integrated sonic display devices; (3) concepts of the integration of the dancing body and the musical body; and (4) new approaches to interactive music and improvisation in a "composed context." Our approach prioritizes music as "activity" in both instrument design and sonic display. We find physicality, feedback, and gesture-the reintegration of the body in electronic music-are all key to maintaining and extending musical/social traditions within a technological context.
Generally mobile devices are seen being transportable, but they are moveable too-‐ their ability to detect body-‐motions is often ignored. Based on theories of the origin of music and of playing music, the instrumentarization / mediatisation of expressive sounds and behaviour become role models for intuitive emotional / personalized interfaces in social interaction. The ability to detect motion make mobile devices a kind of extension of the expressive body-‐motion to create expressive sounds; the ability to share these sounds in social interaction make mobile devices tools to create collective "sounds in progress" and collectivize the agents. Based on these theories of music being emotional communication in social interaction and these abilities of devices being "mobile" various solutions of emotional communication by sound creating a new kind of "pop-‐music" as "playing music" immediately by the body is introduced. Based on experimental studies of musical and gestural interaction the use of mobile devices and apps. (creating those new kinds of (pop-‐)music) in music-‐education/-‐therapy or measuring emotional behaviour in marketing research is shown. Finally intuitive adaptive gestural interfaces / (living-‐)environments and mobile devices / apps. in everyday-‐life of a hedonic culture are introduced and discussed. Jauk, Werner, Intuitive gestural interfaces/adaptive environments and mobile devices/apps. Playing music and the musical work as a role model for personalized gestural interaction in social environments. In: ICMWT International conference on Mobile & Wireless Technology Congress-Book, Beijing, 2014, 280- 284.
AffecTech- an affect-aware interactive AV Artwork
2009
New developments in real-time computing and body-worn sensor technology allow us to explore not just visible gestures using inertial sensors, but also invisible changes in an individual’s physiological state using bio-sensors (Kim & Andre 2008). This creates an opportunity for a more intimate interaction between the observer and technology-based art (Gonsalves 2008). We present a technical overview of the AffecTech system; a bio-signal based interactive audio- visual installation commissioned as part of the pre-ISEA symposium in November 2008. Observers were invited to sit on one of 2 sensor-enhanced chairs (Coghlan & Knapp 2008), which transmitted physiological data about the occupant to a central control system. This data was used to control and modulate interactive visuals, live video feeds and a surround sound score, with events and interactions dependent on the observers’ affective/emotional state and the disparity or similarity between the bio-signals of the chairs occupants. ...
"Introduction: Listening Through the Body"
Introductory Chapter Explains how the book: Synthesizes the emerging practice and field of somatechnics with popular music studies Presents the first approach of its kind to popular music consumption and listening practices through the body-emotion perspective Investigates the complex inter-relationships between technologies and music, and how these impact the listening experience as mediated by the body-system