Multimedia is ubiquitously available online with large amounts of video increasingly consumed through Web sites such as YouTube or Google Video. However, online multimedia typically limits users to visual/auditory stimulus, with onscreen visual media accompanied by audio. The recent introduction of MPEG-V proposed multi-sensory user experiences in multimedia environments, such as enriching video content with so-called sensory effects like wind, vibration, light, etc. In MPEG-V, these sensory effects are represented as Sensory Effect Metadata (SEM), which is additionally associated to the multimedia content. This paper presents three user studies that utilize the sensory effects framework of MPEG-V, investigating the emotional response of users and enhancement of Quality of Experience (QoE) of Web video sequences from a range of genres with and without sensory effects. In particular, the user studies were conducted in Austria and Australia to investigate whether geography and cultural differences affect users' elicited emotional responses and QoE.
Humans are assumed to have a natural—universal—predisposition for making music and for musical interaction. Research in this domain is, however, typically conducted with musically trained individuals, and therefore confounded with expertise. Here, we present a rediscovered and updated invention—the E-music box—that we establish as an empirical method to investigate musical production and interaction in everyone. The E-music box transforms rotatory cyclical movements into pre-programmable digital musical output, with tempo varying according to rotation speed. The user’s movements are coded as continuous oscillatory data, which can be analysed using linear or nonlinear analytical tools. We conducted a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate that, using this method, pairs of non-musically trained individuals can interact according to conventional musical practices (leader/follower roles and lower-pitch dominance). The results suggest that the E-music box brings ‘active’ and ‘interactive’ musical capacities within everyone’s reach. We discuss the potential of this method for exploring the universal predisposition for music making and interaction in developmental and cross-cultural contexts, and for neurologic musical therapy and rehabilitation.
Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language of northern Australia, which, like bilingual input, has differences in the relative frequency of adjacent, overlapping vowel categories. In Analysis 1, we provide the first systematic account of vowel variation and phone frequency in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol. In Analysis 2, cluster analysis was applied to the vowel formant and duration data, to see what categories might emerge from acoustic data alone. The results suggest that, were infants to base their initial vowel categories solely on the clusters emerging in acoustic space, they might likely set up relatively few vowel categories. We discuss implications for how infants may learn Gurindji Kriol and for distributional learning.
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