Toward Emotionally-Congruent Dynamic Soundtrack Generation.

Emotionally congruent sound effect generation can be particularly useful in interactive audio applications with non-linear narrative requirements (such as video gaming). The study of affect (broadly construed here as recognition of emotional suggestion rather than individual emotional response) increasingly concludes that acoustic features can have an influence on the perceived emotional characteristics of an audio signal, from environmental sounds to musical stimuli. This paper presents an investigative approach to measuring the relative impact of musical voicing, in particular musical timbre, on perceived emotion as reported by a panel of listeners, as part of work towards an automated system designed to manipulate sound effects in real-time according to a particular affective intent. In the future this type of system could combine selective spectro-temporal morphing between source sounds and affective acoustic correlates with musical feature quantification and interpolation in order to manipulate a palette of sound effects or music through an emotional space based on quantified affective correlates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]