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Sensory Chairs : A System for Biosignal Research and Performance

Niall Coghlan, and Benjamin Knapp

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Music and sound have the power to provoke strong emotional and physical responses within us. Although concepts such as emotion can be hard to quantify in a scientific manner there has been significant research into how the brain and body respond to music. However much of this research has been carried out in clinical, laboratory type conditions with intrusive or cumbersome monitoring devices. Technological augmentation of low-tech objects can increase their functionality, but may necessitate a form of context awareness from those objects. Biosignal monitoring allows these enhanced artefacts to gauge physical responses and from these extrapolate our emotions. In this paper a system is outlined, in which a number of chairs in a concert hall environment were embedded with biosignal sensors allowing monitoring of audience reaction to a performance, or control of electronic equipment to create a biosignal-driven performance. This type of affective computing represents an exciting area of growth for interactive technology and potential applications for 'affect aware' devices are proposed.

Citation

Niall Coghlan, and Benjamin Knapp. 2008. Sensory Chairs : A System for Biosignal Research and Performance. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1179513 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry


@inproceedings{nime2008_Coghlan,
author = {Coghlan, Niall and Knapp, Benjamin},
title = {Sensory Chairs : A System for Biosignal Research and Performance},
pages = {233--236},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
year = {2008},
address = {Genoa, Italy},
issn = {2220-4806},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1179513},
url = {https://nime.org/proceedings/2008/nime2008_233.pdf},
keywords = {Ubiquitous computing, context -awareness, networking, embedded systems, chairs, digital artefacts, emotional state sensing, affective computing, biosignals. },
abstract = {Music and sound have the power to provoke strong emotional and physical responses within us. Although concepts such as emotion can be hard to quantify in a scientific manner there has been significant research into how the brain and body respond to music. However much of this research has been carried out in clinical, laboratory type conditions with intrusive or cumbersome monitoring devices. Technological augmentation of low-tech objects can increase their functionality, but may necessitate a form of context awareness from those objects. Biosignal monitoring allows these enhanced artefacts to gauge physical responses and from these extrapolate our emotions. In this paper a system is outlined, in which a number of chairs in a concert hall environment were embedded with biosignal sensors allowing monitoring of audience reaction to a performance, or control of electronic equipment to create a biosignal-driven performance. This type of affective computing represents an exciting area of growth for interactive technology and potential applications for 'affect aware' devices are proposed.}
}