Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Professional theatre actors are highly specialized in controlling their own expressive behaviour and non-verbal emotional expressiveness, so they are of particular interest in fields of study such as affective computing. We present Acting Emotions, an experimental protocol to investigate the physiological correlates of emotional valence and arousal within professional theatre actors. Ultimately, our protocol examines the physiological agreement of valence and arousal amongst several actors. Our main contribution lies in the open selection of the emotional set by the participants, based on a set of four categorical emotions, which are self-assessed at the end of each experiment. The experiment protocol was validated by analyzing the inter-rater agreement (> 0.261 arousal, > 0.560 valence), the continuous annotation trajectories, and comparing the box plots for different emotion categories. Results show that the participants successfully induced the expected emotion set to a significant statistical level of distinct valence and arousal distributions. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Abstract
Digital musical instruments have become increasingly prevalent in musical creation and production. Optimizing their usability and, particularly, their expressiveness, has become essential to their study and practice. The absence of multimodal feedback, present in traditional acoustic instruments, has been identified as an obstacle to complete performer-instrument interaction in particular due to the lack of embodied control. Mobile-based digital musical instruments present a particular case by natively providing the possibility of enriching basic auditory feedback with additional multimodal feedback. In the experiment presented in this article, we focused on using visual and haptic feedback to support and enrich auditory content to evaluate the impact on basic musical tasks (i.e., note pitch tuning accuracy and time). The experiment implemented a protocol based on presenting several musical note examples to participants and asking them to reproduce them, with their performance being compared between different multimodal feedback combinations. Collected results show that additional visual feedback was found to reduce user hesitation in pitch tuning, allowing users to reach the proximity of desired notes in less time. Nonetheless, neither visual nor haptic feedback was found to significantly impact pitch tuning time and accuracy compared to auditory-only feedback.