Emotion in Motion: A Reimagined Framework for Biomusical/Emotional Interaction

Our experiment, Emotion in Motion, has amassed the world's largest database of human physiology associated with emotion in response to the presentation of various selections of musical works. What began as a doctoral research study has grown to include the emotional responses to musical experience from over ten thousand participants across the world, from installations in Dublin, New York City, Norway, Singapore, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The most recent iteration of is currently underway in Taipei City, Taiwan. Preparation for this installation provided an opportunity to reimagine the architecture of , allowing for a wider range of potential applications than were originally possible with the original tools that drove the experiment. Now more than an experiment, is a framework for developing myriad emotional/musical/biomusical interactions with multiple co-located or remote participants. This paper describes the development of this open-source framework and includes discussion of its various components: hardware agnostic sensor inputs, refined physiological signal processing tools, and a public database of data collected during various instantiations of applications built on the framework. We also discuss our ongoing work with this tool, and provide the reader with other potential applications that they might realize in using .