Emotion -is It Measurable ?

In this work a texture paradigm is introduced as a means for modeling certain types of music organization. This approach allows quantitatively to assess diierences between musical materials which are not captured by musical \rules" or schemes. In the context of emotion it is assumed that relations exist between deviations from a given, existing 'normative' musical organisation and expressive innections. Excitement and calmness are considered as deviations from a normative state that a given texture state induces. Diierent types of textures are considered and the degree of change is measured by statistical distance between their probabilistic models. This method is suggested to be a way to measure the amount of change (degree of innection) that occurs in the musical material. An implementation of this work in a simple midi real time system is given. A short Prelude-"Can you imagine a system that evaluates the amount of emotional aaect present in a music piece ?" I ask.-"But this is completely absurd!" one might immediately respond. "Emotion is completely subjective, its sense being impounded by one's cultural and social backgrounds, aesthetic preferences and even momentary moods, predispositions and the most seeming-less, eeting sensations ..."-"All right", I insist. "But let us assume a more limited system, let's say just something like a set of dials that dance according to the music as it changes towards more tense vs. more calm, becoming more soothing or more arousing ? Does this still require so much prior knowledge ?"-"May be not, but then how can you deene a measure of such changes ? Music is such a complex phenomena , with the interplay between its parameters being completely un-graspable !"-"So let us consider just a very simple music-let's say an aleatoric texture or an ambient sound-may be now we can ?" ...