FEELTRACE Leaders Ellen Douglas-Cowie and Cate Cox

Overview Feeltrace is a computer program which allows listeners/viewers to track the perceived emotional content of a stimulus in real time in a two dimensional space The dimensions are activation (active to passive) and evaluation (positive to negative) Developed by Roddy Cowie (with Marc Schroeder, Martin Sawey, Ellen Douglas-Cowie, Edelle McMahon, and Suzie Savvidou)

The Concept Description and analysis of real life emotional interchanges means coming to terms with two key issues –Gradation - spontaneous speech is generally characterised by emotional shading rather than episodes of fullblown archetypal emotion –Variation over time - emotional shading of everyday speech is rarely constant FEELTRACE is designed to let observers track an emotional interchange as they perceive it, taking full account of gradation and variation over time FEELTRACE function is to record the way the signs are perceived by reasonably representative observers

From Concept to Program FEELTRACE is based on a 2 dimensional representation of emotion - a representation derived from psychology The activation dimension measures how dynamic the emotional state is; the evaluation dimension measures the positive/negative feeling associated with the state Research suggests that the space is naturally circular, i.e. states at limit of emotional intensity define a circle, with alert neutrality at the centre To turn those ideas into a recording tool, the space was represented by a circle on a computer screen Observers describe perceived emotional state by moving a pointer (in the form of a disc) to the appropriate point in the circle, using a mouse

The program Feeltrace written in Visual Basic Can be used on audio data alone, video data alone or on audio-visual data Feeltrace software allows several variants of program to be run –Default version presents activation-evaluation space in form of a circle with ‘landmark’ words placed at strategic points – Additional options include presenting the dimensions in the form of a square with or without words Data from Feeltrace are stored as text files –Each line in the textfile has 3 numbers: timecode, evaluation coordinate at that time, activation coordinate at that time Prototypes tested, and refinements made -colour coding the pointer, presenting key emotion words as ‘landmarks’ in the space, developing an induction procedure to introduce observers to the system An experiment assessed the reliability of the developed system

The Feeltrace Display

Feeltrace in Operation

Cont.

Aim of Practical  To train you to use Feeltrace  To show its capabilities and potential