Moog-Emotion

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  Moog-Emotion Hardware Setup

Inspiration

We know how music modulates our state of mind and controls our emotions, be it happy, sad, or angry. We listen to music for relaxation, pleasure, and our cognitive interest. When we are happy, we tend to listen to music with a fast tempo and complementing harmonies. While in sadness, we like slow music with clashing harmonies. In contrast, the mood “anger” is represented by loud sounds and clashing harmonies. So, how would it be if we could have a personalized, automatic, and all-time companion for us to heal our mental state using music?

What it does

Moog-Emotion is an intelligent music system that utilizes different psychological aspects of music to accompany us in our every mood. In other words, it is a musical instrument that tunes itself according to the user’s current emotions and can also control their moods through generation of suitable music.

How we built it

But how would it understand its friend’s mental state? You know, whatever we speak out about is highly correlated with how we are feeling at that time. So, our musical system analyses what we say, how we say and gets to know our mood as well.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge was to make the hardware components compatible with each other and function properly. Specifically, the data acquisition and pre-processing circuit was the critical part. The second challenge was to collect sufficient data (in multiple languages) for the modeling of the detection algorithm. The third challenge was faced while setting up the hardware for automatically controlling the keyboard and nobs of the audio synthesizer. Two factors were necessary in this regard - i) Sufficient pressure is applied in the keys, ii) There is minimum time-lag in between the software and the control hardware. We were finally able to resolve this issue by fine-tuning the 'Automatic Control' circuit and algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have successfully built the working prototype of our musical system which can recognize upto 5 different emotions (e.g. Happy, Sad, Angry, Neutral, Sleepy) using continuous speech and vocal sounds. The system achieves an accuracy of over 86% in detecting the emotions/moods. Also, this system can be used for speakers with many different languages including English, Hindi, German, Bengali, Bhojpuri, etc.

What we learned

This was great learning experience for our team. We have been able to strengthen our hardware design capabilities, coding capacity as well as team-work. This work also helped enhance our musicality!

What's next for Moog-Emotion

Apart from being a system for personalized entertainment, Moog-Emotion has several important applications in promoting human health and well-being. Music is also a very effective and interactive tool for expressing human behaviour or activity. This instrument can regulate the mental state as well as human behaviors through music. Therefore, it becomes particularly helpful for people having some sort of mental instability. Even, this musical system can be used by psychiatrists for mental therapy purposes and to some extent restore mental peace in us. Future applications are summarized as follows:

1. Emotion/Mood control as well as modulation.
2. Instrument for interactively expressing human behaviour.
3. Music system as a tool for psychiatrist therapy to help treat the person.
4. Mental health modulator and Anti-Depression Tool.

Built With

• arduino
• audio-synthesizer
• circuit-design
• matlab