Theory behind Sound Borb

[tgersic]

The idea behind Sound Borb is to create an easy to use system for playing back generative / stochastic (i.e. different every time you hear it) ambient music and sound designs. Generative music has been around for some time, but one problem with it is that it's generally impossible to distribute it in a generative form...it can be recorded, but by being committed to a recording, the generative nature of the music is lost. Sound Borb is an attempt to fill in that gap a bit.

The intensity and happiness parameters are based on a paper by Louis A. Schmidt and Laural J Trainor entitled Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) distinguishes valence and intensity of musical emotions. Put simply, Schmidt and Trainor claim that it's possible to measure the emotions that a person experiences listening to music by monitoring (with an Electroencephalogram) those emotions in two dimensions, valence (which is just a big word for positive v. negative) and intensity. Sound Borb turns this study around a little bit, and instead of measuring effective emotions, it attempts to induce emotions by allowing for the control or randomization of those two dimensions. To keep things simple, I used the word happiness instead of valence, but the principle is the same.