Get a sneak peek of what I am up to with my latest research project which I showcased via this link
Emotional Amplification in Affective Gaming through Music Emotion Recognition
Dasuni Ganepola — General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University
Dr. Pradeep Kalansooriya — General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University
Does Music have a potential for emotional Amplification?
Is music all about emotion-provoking? Well to a certain level, we can do accept this fact. Psychologists have proven that music do affects the brain regions associated with emotions.
So how will this psychological activity benefit researchers like us in the HCI domain?
Well, since music has the potential for emotion stimulation & amplification, music can be considered as a technology creating affect in the research area of Affective Computing. Affect is all about your present emotional state. Affective Computing is the latest research area brought up due to the emergence of Emotion Artificial Intelligence and other affective technologies. Affective Computing will create a new way of living with our digital devices (even the ordinary ones!).
A branch of Affective Computing is Affective gaming It is the latest digital game technology where the players’ real-time emotional state exerts a direct influence on the gameplay to enhance user interactivity. The concept of Affective Gaming is implemented via an affective loop where the gaming system detects real-time emotional states of a player via his biological signals and the system will respond in a manner to increase the emotional interactivity of the player. The system response can be in the approaches of either altering the game plot/ objectives or emotional amplification. The latter approach is yet to be deeply explored and exploited in the Affective Gaming research community.
I and my research partners are working on a project to increase user interactivity in games by emotional amplification game music. It has been proved scientifically that game music is an emotional amplifier in terms of cortical arousal. Hence, a hypothesis was made indicating that game players’ levels of cortical arousal can be amplified from game music through an affective feedback loop, to increase the user interactivity of the game.
To identify and map the relationship between game music and the stimulating cortical arousal levels of players, a technology called Music Emotion Recognition (MER) is being availed in this project. MER will automate the process of human emotion perception happening at the auditory cortex of the human brain. MER is implemented through Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL).
Initial research works have been commenced in this project where MER was applied to game music genres “Rock & Electronic music” ML model was trained to identify relationships & classify music based on cortisol arousal levels in the form of emotion labels. The average precision score of classification resulted in 70.82%.
Our publication is now available on IEEE Xplore. You can check it out for more details on our project: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9313028
