Eventide has released a trial version of Mood, a plug-in ‘that characterises the emotional content of music’.
Mood analyses music for key, spectral content, tempo, dynamics and additional aspects to create a set of ‘descriptors’ which are then compared to a database populated by people listening to and rating pop songs.
Mood displays the relative intensity of four emotions – angry, calm, happy and sad – in real time. The intensity of these emotions are output as Midi and OSC values, which may be used to control the brightness and colour of lights on stage or in a dance club, for eample.
While a computer algorithm can analyse audio six ways to Sunday, it cannot, on its own, map the results of the analysis to how the audio will make someone feel, says Eventide. The computer must be trained by humans. Training is done by asking people to listen to examples of songs that make them ‘feel’ a certain way and having them judge the degree of each emotion. The algorithm then analyzes these rated songs to determine those characteristics involved in eliciting specific emotions. This process creates the ‘descriptors’ that can then be used to analyse a new submission/song.
After months of training, we believe that Mood is ready to be introduced to, and trained by, a wider audience. And so we’re asking for help. The plug-in includes a link that makes it easy for users to give us feedback and to let us know which songs “fool” Mood.
‘Mood is a bit whimsical and no doubt some will question why we bothered to create the plug-in,’ says Eventide’s Tony Agnello. ‘The fact is that audio analysis is at the heart of what we do and we were curious to explore the possibility of using signal analysis to map musical content to emotion. We were also inspired by a well-known producer who, upon learning of the idea, said we were nuts. Fair enough.
‘To date, Mood has been trained on ‘pop’ songs. Solo voice, solo instruments, jazz and classical music will not yield meaningful results. Training is ongoing, however and we’re hoping that people will download the plug-in and help us improve it.’
Mood is available for download at no cost for a 90-day trial period.
More: http://bit.ly/1bT3mHc
