Effect of visual representation in recognizing emotion expressed in a musical performance

We have conducted a series of experiment to investigate the potential of music communication based on emotion for hearing-impaired people and people with hearing abilities. The purpose of the experiments is to design a performance assistance system to enable hearing-impaired people to enjoy taking part in a music ensemble. In this paper, we describe an experiment on recognizing emotion in two media: moving images of a professional percussionist giving an improvised performance and the sounds extracted from the performance. The experiment was designed to investigate whether the image of a performance is important in recognizing emotion in the performance. The result showed that there was no significant difference in recognition of emotion between the two media. Our results were consistent with those of previous experiments: (1) there was no significant difference in recognizing emotion between hearing-impaired people and people with hearing abilities, and (2) ldquofearrdquo was the least recognized of the four emotions.