Towards an emotion-driven interactive music system: ridging the gaps between affect, physiology and sound generation

Report for the scientific sojourn at the Stanford University from January until June 2007. Music is well known for affecting human emotional states, yet the relationship between specific musical parameters and emotional responses is still not clear. With the advent of new human-computer interaction (HCI) technologies, it is now possible to derive emotion-related information from physiological data and use it as an input to interactive music systems. Providing such implicit musical HCI will be highly relevant for a number of applications including music therapy, diagnosis, nteractive gaming, and physiologically-based musical instruments. A key question in such physiology-based compositions is how sound synthesis parameters can be mapped to emotional states of valence and arousal. We used both verbal and heart rate responses to evaluate the affective power of five musical parameters. Our results show that a significant correlation exists between heart rate and the subjective evaluation of well-defined musical parameters. Brightness and loudness showed to be arousing parameters on subjective scale while harmonicity and even partial attenuation factor resulted in heart rate changes typically associated to valence. This demonstrates that a rational approach to designing emotion-driven music systems for our public installations and music therapy applications is possible.

Sports and journalism ethics: the coverage of 2012 London Olympics in the British, North-American and Spanish press

Sports and journalism ethics: the coverage of 2012 London Olympics in the British, North-American and Spanish press is a research focused on analysing the treatment that the quality press of three countries (United Kingdom, United States of America and Spain) will carry out in the London Olympic Games. Through a solid methodological approach based on the combination of the qualitative content analysis and qualitative indepth interviews, the investigation will study if the media provide a quality coverage,that is, if they adequate their pieces to the fundamental principles of journalistic deontology (truth, justice, freedom and social responsibility). Furthermore, the research will assess if the selected media comply with the prescriptions established in the ethical codes, stylebooks, newsroom statutes and national and international recommendations about journalism ethics, ranging from each media’s guidelines to key transnational codes established by the UNESCO, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) orthe Council of Europe.

La construcción de la marca ‘Qatar’ a partir del deporte: ‘sports place branding’ y prensa deportiva catalana

Los grandes eventos deportivos se han utilizado con fines promocionales para los territorios desde el siglo XIX. En este sentido, la Copa del Mundo de la FIFA de 2022, que se celebrará en Qatar, deviene una excusa ideal para el gobierno de la nación para legitimar su posicionamiento internacional, así como para participar activamente en el negocio mundial del fútbol. Además, desde 2011, Qatar Foundation (QF) ejecuta un acuerdo de patrocinio con el FC Barcelona, último campeón de la UEFA Champions League (ECL) y del Mundial de Clubes de la FIFA (2011), que le permitirá desarrollar proyectos sociales vinculados a la marca Barça en todo el mundo. Este artículo tiene el objetivo de analizar el posicionamiento internacional de Qatar, canalizado mediante un proceso de construcción de marca protagonizado por el deporte y proyectado a través de los medios de comunicación qataríes (AlJazzera) y los propios de los territorios donde el gobierno qatarí invierte, como es el caso de Cataluña.