Influence of Music and Sounds in an Agent-Based Storytelling Environment

Introduction

The importance of sound and music in movies (Film Scoring) is undeniable. Film Scoring is used as a complement to the visual content helping to better understand it. The use of these artistic elements can be extended to interactive storytelling (IS) environments where stories are also told in a dynamic and interactive way. Because of IS particularities, such as the unpredictability of user actions and story development, this extension is not straightforward, and presents a problem that needs to be addressed. Further, the presence of autonomous virtual agents makes the creation of these stories more emergent, making difficult the process of creating sounds and music that is adequate. This paper presents a framework that proposes a possible solution to score a story created in these environments by intelligent virtual agents. Additionally, we studied the influence of some particular elements of sound and music (such as tempo, use of different instruments, etc) on the viewers and their perception of the actions of the characters and thus, on the consequent understanding of the story.