SIEMPRE

SIEMPRE develops research theoretical and methodological frameworks, computational models, and algorithms for the analysis of creative communication within groups of people, important also for future ICT (e.g. social media, on-line and mobile communities, web 2.0). Focus is on ensemble musical performance and audience experience, ideal testbed for the development of models and techniques for measuring creative social interaction in ecological framework. We focus on entrainment, emotional contagion, co-creation, each studied at two levels between performers, between performer and audience - both during explicit communication process (e.g., between orchestra conductor and musicians) and during implicit synchronisation in emotionally intense experiences (joint music performance; audience live experience).

Methodological framework will enable novel approaches to research challenges, including the integration in research teams of outstanding artists (funded by external projects). Expressive Movement, Audio, Physiological (eMAP) multi-layer multimodal features will be extracted from participants using real-time, synchronized, multi-modal feature extraction techniques, and are inputs for theoretical and computational models.

Challenges and objectives:
- key factors driving interpersonal synchronisation of participants
- identify specific roles inside the group (e.g., leadership, hierarchy)
- general principles concerning influence of individuals over others
- factors that determine feelings of group cohesion or a sense of shared meaning
- how eMAPs confirm the validity of reports by participants
- how social context affects individual intrapersonal synchronization of eMAP and vice-versa
- how emotion of the individual affects the collaborative creative product
- neurophysiological foundations of creative group communication.

A publicly available annotated database of behavioral data will be created.

External US and Japan partners:
Stanford Univ. and Waseda Univ.