An article out of left field this month, "Quantitative and visual analysis of the impact of music on perceived emotion of film" which is published in the latest Computers in Entertainment (CIE) magazine. It is quite interesting and shows that music has strong impact on the perceived emotion of film. I thought this could be a good place to start thinking about enriching user interfaces with music for emotional design. Quantitative and visual analysis of the impact of music on perceived emotion of film

This article presents quantitative and visual methods for the analysis of the effect of music on emotion perceived in film. We discover strong, visible, and quantifiable trends in the effect of music on perceived emotion of film. We perform studies using both selected classical and composed music segments annotated with diverse emotions, paired with ambiguous film clips. We collect and analyze viewers' ratings of stress, activity, and dominance in the silent film, and film with various music soundtracks. The results are mapped onto a three-dimensional emotion space for visual and quantitative analysis. Aggregate scatter plots and center of mass results are presented using this emotion space. We find that the center of mass of the perceived emotion of film and music combined is consistently situated on a path between the center of mass of the musicalone response and that of the film-alone response. Regression analysis based on this trajectory observation results in coefficients with high R2 values (R2 = 0.675 for stress, R2 = 0.817 for activity, and R2 = 0.813 for dominance) for the first study with classical music selections, and lower R2 values (R2 = 0.199 for stress, R2 = 0.405 for activity, and R2 = 0.660 for dominance) for the second study with composed music. We conclude that continuous treatment of the two-dimensional emotion space provides a metric for comparing and assessing emotion ratings, and that spatial interpolation in this space provides a viable method for predicting the effect of music on perceived emotion of film.

Full Paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1316511.1316516
Full Proceedings: Computers in Entertainment (CIE), Volume 5, Issue 3 (July/September 2007)

Labels: design, emotion, film, music

Have you ever thought about the relationship between having constraints and creativity? I have recently found an article called "Creativity Loves Constraints" which was published on BussinessWeek. Basically, the author, who is the Google's vice president of search products and user experience, believes that it helps to have some constraint to see a lot of innovation. Having this article in mind, I turned to ACM DL and found this short paper "Simplicity in interaction design" presented at the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07. This paper presents a design exercise which forces designers to imagine alternative ways to represent information when there is a specific constraint. This exercise shows how an arbitrary constraint can give new insight to design. These two articles made me think: in accessibility community, "don't we all do these kind of exercises all the time?". Simplicity in interaction design

Attaining simplicity is a key challenge in interaction design. Our approach relies on a minimalist design exercise to explore the communication capacity for interaction components. This approach results in expressive design solutions, useful perspectives of interaction design and new interaction techniques.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226997
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the first international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction TEI '07

Labels: constraint, Creativity, design, interaction, simplicity