Auditory Emotional Access to Visual Information

Abstract

Seeing a picture and developing feelings for this is nearly impossible for blind persons. There isn’t any system to reveal an emotional access to pictures for those persons. Surveys showed that it is very important for blind to transport emotions independently of the content especially for modern images. These emotions shall correlate with the feelings of seeing people. This sonification system enables an emotional access using the similarity of feeling by watching a picture or hearing music and transforming visual information in music compositions. Results of psychological, physiological and emotional acoustic researches, methods of image analysis and the rules of music composition are basis for this translation. After digitalization and image analysis, the presented system generates new data for the generation of synthetic music. The complete process takes the necessary aspects of the auditory and visual perception into account. A first version has already been developed and tested.