TOPIC: Volunteers needed for thesis study

Hello friends and fellow TDers!<br /><br />I need your help if you're bored and have 15 minutes! (Plus my wife won't let me play games nor help Jeff and TD until I get it done.)<br /><br />As some of you may or may not know I am a part-time graduate student at the IU School of Informatics working to complete my Master's thesis research in the area of automated, predictive methods for evaluating music based on emotion and musical properties. I am posting to ask your assistance by participating in an online survey which can be taken at your convenience.<br /><br />The survey consists of six second clips of music along with two emotional scales for each clip.  For example, after listening to an embedded music clip you will see scales such as:<br /><br />1. Happy-Satisfied-Positive: O O O O O O O : Unhappy-Unsatisfied-Negative<br />2. Stimulated-Excited-Active: O O O O O O O :Relaxed-Calm-Passive:<br /><br />To respond, you would simply click on a circle along each scale closer to the word set that describes your emotional reaction to the music.<br /><br />Other important points of the study include:<br />- You will not be asked any personal or identification information.<br />- Participation is voluntary. You are free to quit at anytime if the survey is inconvenient or makes you uncomfortable.<br />- The survey will take approximately 15 to 20 minutes to complete all of the clips and scales.<br />- Speakers or headphones will be necessary to participate.<br /><br />If you are interested in participating, please go to the following web address at a time that is convenient for you:<br /><br /> http://www.ohboymedia.com/thesis/index.asp <br /><br />Thank you for your assistance! <br /><br />Stuart O.<br />

Music Education<br />Music Business<br />Music Therapy<br />or Music.........?<br /><br />Just curious.<br /><br /><br />Do you sing?  If so, I MUST hear you!  =D

Hey Indy.  <br /><br />I just answered Relax and Unhappy for all of them.  Hope this helps!  ;^) <br /><br />Kidding of course.  Good luck with your research.

Thanks much for participating! The more that do the better my statistical analysis will be... except for all those marked Relaxed-Unhappy.  <br /><br />And be happy it wasn't me singing on there. I am a horrible singer!<br /><br />My purpose is business related. My employer, Thomson Inc. is the maker of the Lyra brand mp3 player (in fact Thomson helped created the mp3 format). We and other companies are looking at ways to better categorize and select music from the increasingly large music libraries. Mood is one area being studied. So instead of selecting artist A, you might say I'm in "X" mood so play me this type of music. Or you might say I'm in "X" mood, but want to be in "TD" mood, so play me music to move me there.<br /><br />As we all know, music has been used to affect mood since the beginning. My study is just looking at one small part - automating the clustering and predicting the emotional reaction.

Indy, will definitely do this when I have the time!

IndyHalfling, I will try to do this from home tonight - work has restrictions on what I can do here, but I look forward to checking this out!<br /><br />brian<br />

Done deal.  Happy to be a part of your thesis.  Hurry up, get it done, so you can spend more time on TD.  Course your little one will keep you plenty busy.<br /><br /><br /><br />Widseth

<br />If you could - release your results/findings...I've not had a good survey thingy to review since my old Experimental Psych days.  I did a killer Reaction time experiment using video games...it was a blast testing people on that!<br />

<br /><br />That would have been a blast to experiment with! I'm trying to talk work into sponsoring some research into Nintendo Wii. If it had come out a year ago my advisor would have been happy to have me do my thesis on some aspect of its functionality. Perhaps learnability vs traditional controllers. The outcome seems obvious = natural movements would be easier to learn etc. Who knows. We never explored it. Oh well. Maybe for work!

Hey Stu,<br /><br />Just my own observation from the thing.<br />Some of the line up itself has to do with reaction. I know going from something relatively sedate, to a screechy part of song immediately flagged that track as annoying to me.<br />Or some tracks that were only so so, a few similar tracks in a row like that also became annoying.<br />Also in some ways it didn't really let you express musically the reaction.<br />For instance alot of music got flagged as relaxing-calm. But there is different types within that got flagged that I wouldn't put together in a music list. For instance listening to relaxing Jazz, is not the same as calm classical.<br />One is a more upbeat relaxing while the other is a more sedate relaxing.<br />I know in my playlists, I have a relaxing but still peppy instrumental music a few hours in to it as I'm sure to have run into something frustrating. <br />Typically I toss in Ottmar Liebert(flamenco guitar) or Vientos de los Andes (peruvian folk/instrumental). This is to keep my mood up through the frustration part.<br /><br />On projects that are just trying the whole way through I may stick with nothing but classical to help keep me even-keeled, as some projects are just to flustering to be peppy with.<br /><br />Anyways, just my two cents.

I did it for you, woowoo

Thank you to everyone for taking the survey and for the comments! I ggrrrrreatly appreciate it.<br /><br />I had no idea when I got the topic just how massive this area of research is. I got handed an old project that used a software algorithm to study over 20 aspects of a songs acoustical properties and cluster music according to these mathmatical properties.  It was found to be somewhat rather successful in grouping songs but only moderately so when they conducted focus groups. These very intelligent mathemeticians and sound engineers didn't really ask the fuzzy question of "what did it mean to people." "How do I relate to the music collections?" There are lots of ways to categorize music now... ranging from the human-created data tags (genre, artist, era, etc), to vast clustering projects done by music professionals, to simple personal taste and playlists.<br /><br />I decided to see if there was an emotional similarity or connection between the users and songs within various clusters created by this music. We had some rather positive results from my initial research that said yes, this cluster is eliciting this similar response among our participants. Even then we realized, that that didn't tell us anything too concrete. So in this final stage my advisor and I tweaked the algorithm to use the emotional scores from my initial research to "train" itself to predict the emotion that the music will elicit. This survey you all are doing is part of my "training regiment" and control to further test the algorithm.<br /><br />Even with the relatively narrow focus, I have still felt overwhelmed at times with the potential scope of research available into emotions and music. I can see why more intelligent people have devoted a lifetime to understanding just portions of it. There are so many confounding variables that pop up in the design that it is maddening to try and control them all. Some I've had to just allow, but try to minimize just for the sake of scope, time and resources. In this case I needed a large number of pieces of music, so I had to settle for shorter clips so as to avoid "test fatigue" in participants. Even now I feel it gets monotonous towards the end and am afraid that people might just start clicking buttons. Joyus and Fritz pointed out one of the biggest hurdles myself and others have faced - predisposed emotional connection to a music selection. Many studies show memory and emotion are closely linked. So if a song stirs a particular memory it will bias the emotion, etc. <br /><br />Luckily I have the academic luxury of stating some assumptions, some recognized variables and relating how it may affect the outcome. I don't necessarily have to squelch them all. Even more lucky, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!!<br /><br />And thanks to all your help I should reach it sooner!<br /><br />Thanks again to all! (wow, may be the longest post I've written.  :O)

<br />Are you looking at the impact of age with your survey...clearly some of the songs I listened too brought me back to my pre-teen years ...(when life was worry free)... I know I rated those songs much higher than all the rest.<br />

<br /><br />I did in the first phase of my research, both age and gender. For this phase not so much. Memory is a big confounding factor. In this phase we had to take the approach that in the broad, real world there will always be variances between peoples reactions based on just such things, but that in the end the law of averages will even it out and give us the most common reaction.<br /><br />Not perfect, but hey.