Relationships between Musical Audio, Perceived Qualities and Motoric Responses – a Pilot Study

The paper describes a pilot experiment in which quantitative and structural relationships between auditory stimuli, perceived qualities and motoric responses to music are investigated. In a previous study [16] a 3-dimensional semantic space of perceived qualities was extracted from the data of a group of hundred students that evaluated sixty musical excerpts (each thirty seconds long). Stepwise multiple regression then revealed significant relationships between these three dimensions and audio cues. Valence adjectives correlate with number of onsets, tempo and harmonicity. Dominance was related to roughness and loudness. Less good results have been obtained with Arousal but this is explained by the fact that the method is calling for cognitive evaluation whereas arousal adjectives may call upon personal emotional engagements. The present pilot study aimed at extending this methodology to motoric behavioral responses. For this aim, cognitive and motoric responses to all sixty musical excerpts were recorded with a computer mouse from seven subjects. The study aimed at finding correlations between motoric behavior and cognitive evaluation, as well as between motoric behavior and audio features. Although significant correlations were found between perceived qualities and audio cues, no significant correlations have been found between perceived qualities and motoric cues, nor among motoric and audio cues. This may be due to the kind of feature extraction used for the motoric behavioral data: although they proved to be useful in other contexts, they were inappropriate for summarization over the entire musical excerpt. Despite the negative outcome at this stage of the research, the described experiment revealed new methodological and technical issues which can probably be solved. On a broader scale we performed this study as an initial step in a research program on the motoric annotation of perceived musical qualities. In the near future similar related experiments will be carried out using 2-D an 3-D haptic and digital interfaces.