Mood Visualiser: Augmented Music Visualisation Gauging Audience Arousal

In many Western performing art traditions, audiences have been ascribed a position of receiver not bearing creative roles. Such perception of audiences sees a radical shift in contemporary participatory art which fosters a greater creative involvement and appropriation of audiences. In this paper, we augment the music listening experience through sound-reactive visuals which vary according to listeners' arousal response. Our approach seeks to involve audiences in the live generation of visuals accompanying music, giving participants an indirect, yet creative, role. We present an implementation of our concept, Mood Visualiser, a web application which receives data from a wireless bio-sensing platform used to characterise the arousal response of listeners at the physiological level. Mood Visualiser provides an artistic visual representation of the music and the listening experience derived from both the audio and physiological domains. We describe and evaluate a use case that focuses on a listener's electro-dermal activity (EDA), a correlate of arousal (or excitement). Feedback received in user surveys was overall positive and we identified further design challenges around the visual expression of emotions perceived in music, and the suitability of sensor interfaces during the music listening activity.