Gregor Strle

Ethnomuse: Archiving folk music and dance culture

The paper presents the development of EthnoMuse: multimedia digital library of Slovenian folk music and dance culture. The main scope of the project concerns the digitization of production and post-production processes that relate to collecting, documenting and archiving of folk heritage and development of multimedia applications for various content types (folk song, music and dance) and formats (image, audio, video, notation, MIDI etc.). The main objective of this paper is to discuss the former, focusing on the conceptual design of a flexible data model the archive is based on. We also briefly describe the tools developed to support the workflow of researchers involved in collecting and archiving of folk music related contents.

The EthnoMuse digital library: conceptual representation and annotation of ethnomusicological materials

The paper presents two vital aspects of the EthnoMuse digital library. We first present the development of a flexible data model through FRBRoo and CIDOC CRM conceptualization of processes and relations in folk song and music realizations. The approach is novel in that it conceptualizes and integrates various folkloristic and ethnomusicological materials, and also standardizes the workflow of production and post-production processes related to recording and documenting of folk song and music. We also present how novel music information retrieval techniques were integrated into the library to provide support for annotation of its contents. Two case studies are presented: automatic segmentation and labeling of field recordings, and transcription of bell chiming recordings.

Capturing the mood: Evaluation of the moodstripe and moodgraph interfaces

This study presents an evaluation of two interfaces for gathering user feedback in online surveys. We evaluated the intuitiveness, usability and time complexity of the proposed interfaces in comparison to the more standard approaches. Over 900 users first participated in an online survey exploring the influence of mood on their emotional responses to music and colors. We included several new interfaces in this survey, so after it was completed, users were asked to complete a second survey where they evaluated various aspects of the interfaces. Our analysis shows reduced time complexity and increased intuitiveness of the new interfaces, compared to standard approaches, resulting in lower mental difficulty and frustration of participants.

Emotion Elicitation in a Socially Intelligent Service: The Typing Tutor

This paper presents an experimental study on modeling machine emotion elicitation in a socially intelligent service, the typing tutor. The aim of the study is to evaluate the extent to which the machine emotion elicitation can influence the affective state (valence and arousal) of the learner during a tutoring session. The tutor provides continuous real-time emotion elicitation via graphically rendered emoticons, as an emotional feedback to learner’s performance. Good performance is rewarded by the positive emoticon, based on the notion of positive reinforcement. Facial emotion recognition software is used to analyze the affective state of the learner for later evaluation. Experimental results show the correlation between the positive emoticon and the learner’s affective state is significant for all 13 (100%) test participants on the arousal dimension and for 9 (69%) test participants on both affective dimensions. The results also confirm our hypothesis and show that the machine emotion elicitation is significant for 11 (85%) of 13 test participants. We conclude that the machine emotion elicitation with simple graphical emoticons has a promising potential for the future development of the tutor.

A Simple and Efficient Preparation of High‐Purity Hydrogen Trioxide (HOOOH)

A simple and efficient method allows the synthesis of solutions of high-purity hydrogen trioxide (HOOOH), released in the low-temperature methytrioxorhenium(VII) (MTO)-catalyzed transformation of the ozonized polystyrene-supported dimethylphenylsilane. High-purity hydrogen trioxide solutions in diethyl ether, separated from the polymer and free of any reactants and by-products, can be stored at -20 °C for weeks. By removing the solvent in vacuo, HOOOH could be isolated in highly pure form or transferred to other solvents, thus significantly extending the research perspectives of HOOOH for novel applications.

Towards User-Aware Music Information Retrieval: Emotional and Color Perception of Music

This chapter presents our findings on emotional and color perception of music. It emphasizes the importance of user-aware music information retrieval (MIR) and the advantages that research on emotional processing and interaction between multiple modalities brings to the understanding of music and its users. Analyses of results show that correlations between emotions, colors and music are largely determined by context. There are differences between emotion-color associations and valence-arousal ratings in non-music and music contexts, with the effects of genre preferences evident for the latter. Participants were able to differentiate between perceived and induced musical emotions. Results also show how associations between individual musical emotions affect their valence-arousal ratings. We believe these findings contribute to the development of user-aware MIR systems and open further possibilities for innovative applications in MIR and affective computing in general.

The Moodo dataset: Integrating user context with emotional and color perception of music for affective music information retrieval

Abstract This paper presents a new multimodal dataset Moodo that can aid the development of affective music information retrieval systems. Moodo’s main novelties are a multimodal approach that links emotional and color perception to music and the inclusion of user context. Analysis of the dataset reveals notable differences in emotion-color associations and their valence-arousal ratings in non-music and music context. We also show differences in ratings of perceived and induced emotions, especially for those with perceived negative connotation, as well as the influence of genre and user context on perception of emotions. By applying an intermediate data fusion model, we demonstrate the importance of user profiles for predictive modeling in affective music information retrieval scenarios.

Towards a Personalised and Context-Dependent User Experience in Multimedia and Information Systems

Advances in multimedia and information systems have shifted the focus from general content repositories towards personalized systems. Much effort has been put into modeling and integration of affective states with the purpose of improving overall user experience and functionality of the system. In this chapter, we present a multi-modal dataset of users’ emotional and visual (color) responses to music, with accompanying personal and demographic profiles, which may serve as the knowledge basis for such improvement. Results show that emotional mediation of users’ perceptive states can significantly improve user experience in terms of context-dependent personalization in multimedia and information systems.