Displaying Expression in Musical Performance by Means of a Mobile Robot

Abstract

In recent times several attempts have been made to give a robot or broader spoken a computer some kind of feelings in order to understand and model human capacities. The main idea of our work was the design of expressive robot movements for the display of emotional content embedded in the audio layer in both live and recorded music performance. Starting from results in studies on musicians’ body in emotional expressive music performance (see [3]), we tried to map different movement cues (e.g. speed, fluency) to movements of a small mobile robot. The robot had constraints of sensors and motors, so the emotions were implemented taking into account only the main characteristics of musicians’ movements. We implemented movements for the three emotions happiness, anger and sadness. Subjects were asked to judge in a perceptual test which emotional intentions were communicated by the movements.