Brain-activity-driven Real-time Music Emotive Control

Active music listening has emerged as a study field that aims to enable listeners to interactively control music. Most of active music listening systems aim to control music aspects such as playback, equalization, browsing, and retrieval, but few of them aim to control expressive aspects of music to convey emotions. In this study our aim is to enrich the music listening experience by allowing listeners to control expressive parameters in music performances using their perceived emotional state, as detected from their brain activity. We obtain electroencephalogram (EEG) data using a low-cost EEG device and then map this information into a coordinate in the emotional arousal-valence plane. The resulting coordinate is used to apply expressive transformations to music performances in real time by tuning different performance parameters in the KTH Director Musices rule system. Preliminary results show that the emotional state of a person can be used to trigger meaningful expressive music performance transformations.