Novel Methods in Facilitating Audience and Performer Interaction Using the Mood Conductor Framework

While listeners’ emotional response to music is the subject of numerous studies, less attention is payed to the dynamic emotion variations due to the interaction between artists and audiences in live improvised music performances. By opening a direct communication channel from audience members to performers, the Mood Conductor system provides an experimental framework to study this phenomenon. Mood Conductor facilitates interactive performances and thus also has an inherent entertainment value. The framework allows audience members to send emotional directions using their mobile devices in order to “conduct” improvised performances. Audience indicated emotion coordinates in the arousal-valence space are aggregated and clustered to create a video projection. This is used by the musicians as guidance, and provides visual feedback to the audience. Three di↵erent systems were developed and tested within our framework so far. These systems were trialled in several public performances with di↵erent ensembles. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that musicians and audiences are highly engaged with the systems, and raise new insights enabling future improvements of the framework.