Pulsed Melodic Processing – The Use of Melodies in Affective Computations for Increased Processing Transparency

Abstract

Pulsed Melodic Processing (PMP) is a computation protocol that utilizes musically-based pulse sets (“melodies”) for processing – capable of representing the arousal and valence of affective states. Affective processing and affective input/output are key tools in artificial intelligence and computing. In the designing of processing elements (e.g. bits, bytes, floats, etc.), engineers have primarily focused on the processing efficiency and power. They then go on to investigate ways of making them perceivable by the user/engineer. However Human-Computer Interaction research – and the increasing pervasiveness of computation in our daily lives – supports a complementary approach in which computational efficiency and power are more balanced with understandability to the user/engineer. PMP allows a user to tap into the processing path to hear a sample of what is going on in that affective computation, as well as providing a simpler way to interface with affective input/output systems. This requires the developing of new approaches to processing and interfacing PMP-based modules. In this chapter we introduce PMP and examine the approach using three example: a military robot team simulation with an affective subsystem, a text affective-content estimation system, and a stock market tool.