Towards Constructing Emotional Landscapes with Music

This chapter describes how the authors arrived at a new paradigm for human-computer interaction that they call tropic mediation. They describe the origins of the research in a wish to provide a concert planner with an expert system. Some consideration is given to how music might have arisen within human culture and, in particular, why it presents unique problems of verbal description. An initial investigation into a discrete, stable lexicon of musical effect is summarized and the authors explain how and why they reached their current work on a computable model of word connotation rather than reference. It is concluded that machines, in order to communicate with people, will need to work with a model of emotional implication to approach the “human” sense of words.