Sound Opinions: Creating a Virtual Tool for Sound Art Installations through Sentiment Analysis of Critical Reviews

Anthony T. Marasco

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

The author presents Sound Opinions, a custom software tool that uses sentiment analysis to create sound art installations and music compositions. The software runs inside the NodeRed.js programming environment. It scrapes text from web pages, pre-processes it, performs sentiment analysis via a remote API, and parses the resulting data for use in external digital audio programs. The sentiment analysis itself is handled by IBM's Watson Tone Analyzer. The author has used this tool to create an interactive multimedia installation, titled Critique. Sources of criticism of a chosen musical work are analyzed and the negative or positive statements about that composition work to warp and change it. This allows the audience to only hear the work through the lens of its critics, and not in the original form that its creator intended.

Citation:

Anthony T. Marasco. 2018. Sound Opinions: Creating a Virtual Tool for Sound Art Installations through Sentiment Analysis of Critical Reviews. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1302611

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Marasco2018,
 abstract = {The author presents Sound Opinions, a custom software tool that uses sentiment analysis to create sound art installations and music compositions. The software runs inside the NodeRed.js programming environment. It scrapes text from web pages, pre-processes it, performs sentiment analysis via a remote API, and parses the resulting data for use in external digital audio programs. The sentiment analysis itself is handled by IBM's Watson Tone Analyzer. The author has used this tool to create an interactive multimedia installation, titled Critique.  Sources of criticism of a chosen musical work are analyzed and the negative or positive statements about that composition work to warp and change it.  This allows the audience to only hear the work through the lens of its critics, and not in the original form that its creator intended.},
 address = {Blacksburg, Virginia, USA},
 author = {Anthony T. Marasco},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1302611},
 editor = {Luke Dahl, Douglas Bowman, Thomas Martin},
 isbn = {978-1-949373-99-8},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {346--347},
 publisher = {Virginia Tech},
 title = {Sound Opinions: Creating a Virtual Tool for Sound Art Installations through Sentiment Analysis of Critical Reviews},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2018/nime2018_paper0074.pdf},
 year = {2018}
}