Electro-Psychology and Music

Electro-psychology and Music

Ambience: violin, electronic music
With the help of computers, is there a way to directly translate emotions to musical sound? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Knapp: What I’m interested in is seeing if we can control music , not in the typical way of pressing a key on a keyboard or drawing a violin bow across a violin. Can we create music directly from an emotion that we feel? Is there a way that if I feel sad, that I will hear something maybe that’s sad or just something that maybe I want to hear when I’m feeling sad. Or when I’m happy, can I create something that’s either sounds happy, or just what I wanna hear when I’m happy?

Ben Knapp is Director of the Institute of Creativity, Art, and Technology at Virginia Tech.

Knapp: Accomplishing that has been the subject of my research for a long period of time now. We have to look at the electrical signals in the body because those reflect your emotional state. Apply a little bit of electricity on your fingertip, and we can measure the ability of the skin to conduct electricity. And from that, we can know how much your skin is sweating. When you’re sad, you can kind of feel your breathing slow down and your heart rate, or if you’re just relaxed. You can put something on your fingertip that shines light into your finger, and what happens is the reflection of that light changes, depending on the blood going in and coming out. So, those ways of looking at the electro-physiology of the body allows a glimpse to human emotion.

With electro-psychological input from the performer and the audience, a computer then maps out transforms what a composer has written and transforms it into music. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Electro-Psychology and Music

Is there a way to directly translate emotions directly to musical sound, with a little help from computers?
Air Date:02/20/2015
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Electro-psychology and Music

Ambience: violin, electronic music
With the help of computers, is there a way to directly translate emotions to musical sound? I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Knapp: What I'm interested in is seeing if we can control music , not in the typical way of pressing a key on a keyboard or drawing a violin bow across a violin. Can we create music directly from an emotion that we feel? Is there a way that if I feel sad, that I will hear something maybe that's sad or just something that maybe I want to hear when I'm feeling sad. Or when I'm happy, can I create something that's either sounds happy, or just what I wanna hear when I'm happy?

Ben Knapp is Director of the Institute of Creativity, Art, and Technology at Virginia Tech.

Knapp: Accomplishing that has been the subject of my research for a long period of time now. We have to look at the electrical signals in the body because those reflect your emotional state. Apply a little bit of electricity on your fingertip, and we can measure the ability of the skin to conduct electricity. And from that, we can know how much your skin is sweating. When you're sad, you can kind of feel your breathing slow down and your heart rate, or if you're just relaxed. You can put something on your fingertip that shines light into your finger, and what happens is the reflection of that light changes, depending on the blood going in and coming out. So, those ways of looking at the electro-physiology of the body allows a glimpse to human emotion.

With electro-psychological input from the performer and the audience, a computer then maps out transforms what a composer has written and transforms it into music. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.