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Storytelling is a long-established human tradition for entertainment and knowledge transfer. Social robots are emerging as a new storytelling medium, being able to imitate human storytelling using gestures but also extend it by adding, e.g., sound effects to the experience. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, we conducted an online video-based study to investigate the effects of congruent respectively incongruent or no gesture usage in combination with additional non-speech sounds, i.e. sound effects and background music, on recipients' transportation into the story told, emotion induction, and perception of the robot. Results indicate no effect of additional non-speech sound integration on the variables listed above. Contradicting with related findings from in-person studies, we found a no significant differences between congruent, incongruent and no gesture usage. Last, no interplay of additional sounds and gesture congruence was identified. Future studies should provide deeper insights into the importance of multimodal congruence in video-taped robots and the possible advantages of adding non-speech sounds to online but also in-person robotic storytelling as well as their interplay in in-person HRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrzej Karałow (b. 1991) is a pianist, composer and improviser. In his approach to music, an avid interest of the young generation, he breaks free from the traditional form and instrumentation, striving for creative freedom and artistic exploration. The composer combines a variety of trends that are fundamental for several genres of music and determine a contemporary world of sounds. Performing as a pianist and guitar player, Karałow creates artistic projects with Jerzy Przeździecki, a recognised Polish experimental electronic artist. Trajectory of Green, the subject of this analysis, originates from the album Pedestal's Complement (2020). In this production, Karałow and Przeździecki present environmental or landscape music that reflects the patterns of the surrounding world. Their works are mostly improvised and are a perfect example of the use of space as a vital element of the composition. Inspirations with the landscape and its components appearing in our perception determine the general vision of the work as well as its details. The composer draws patterns from the space around him and creatively transforms them into a new artistic construct. This prompts the following question: To what extent does the increasingly popular concept of environmental music apply to the work in question? The article offers an analysis of the compositional devices along with the language of expression/artistic style, both at the level of the work's microform and macroform, while also considering the influence of ambient music on this type of composition. Given the evident landscape component in the idea, form and structure of the work, Trajectory of Green is analysed as an example of landscape music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio Fingerprinting (AFP) is a well-studied problem in music information retrieval for various use-cases e.g. content-based copy detection, DJ-set monitoring, and music excerpt identification. However, AFP for continuous broadcast monitoring (e.g. for TV & Radio), where music is often in the background, has not received much attention despite its importance to the music industry. In this paper (1) we present BAF, the first public dataset for music monitoring in broadcast. It contains 74 hours of production music from Epidemic Sound and 57 hours of TV audio recordings. Furthermore, BAF provides cross-annotations with exact matching timestamps between Epidemic tracks and TV recordings. Approximately, 80% of the total annotated time is background music. (2) We benchmark BAF with public state-of-the-art AFP systems, together with our proposed baseline PeakFP: a simple, non-scalable AFP algorithm based on spectral peak matching. In this benchmark, none of the algorithms obtain a F1-score above 47%, pointing out that further research is needed to reach the AFP performance levels in other studied use cases. The dataset, baseline, and benchmark framework are open and available for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regardless of newly developed forms of narration, listening to stories remains a popular leisure activity. However, storytelling is also evolving. With social robots taking on activities initially conducted by humans, they are emerging as a new storytelling medium. Robots are able to extend human storytelling by adding sounds to the narrative to enhance recipients' emotional reaction to and transportation into the story. To this end, we conducted an online study to compare the traditional audio book to a robotic storyteller, focusing on the influence of adding sound effects and music in both storytelling approaches. Results show that neither emotion induction nor transportation was significantly affected by storytelling medium or additional sounds, but descriptive values indicate a trend towards higher emotion induction and transportation when adding sound to robotic storytelling relative to the audio book condition without additional sounds. Live replications based on this preliminary study might reveal less ambiguous findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The didactic movies uploaded on YouTube are a very popular learning resource used in the academic environment, because it stimulates the students' engagement and motivation. We conducted an opinion survey among 170 students (average age 20.93 ± 2.751) at the Faculty of Dental Medicine, "Grigore T. Popa" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Romania, about their interest in using educational movies as didactic tools, and the features they prefer in such materials. We used an anonymously questionnaire with 15 items to investigate the students' opinion about certain features of the didactic movies, which can be included or avoided in order to stimulate the learning and are highly responsible for the educational videos' cognitive value. For the statistical processing of collected data we used the Two-Step Clustering procedure, for qualitative data. The procedure identified 5 distinct clusters, with sizes between 30 (17.6%) and 43 (25.3%) from the total number of cases. The clusters quality wasn't the best, but still we were able to identify among the investigated features the most important predictors, which are: the presence of background music in the movies; the presence of images used to fill the breaks; the movie's total length shorter than 6 minutes; the using of explicative notes for charts and drawings displayed directly on the drawing and the movie's design as a PowerPoint presentation, with images, diagrams and animated schemes. The scientific literature provides many information about the features recommended to be used in didactic movies but, as far as we know, a classification regarding the relevance of these features was not discussed yet. That is why our study brings useful information in this area, helping the content developers to improve the quality and the popularity of the didactic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a colourful and enigmatic figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. Being active in several spheres of art, in an atmosphere of fin de siècle, he proposed and implemented the concept of musique d'ameublement ("furniture music"). In his vision music was supposed to play an extravagant role (as it was perceived in that period) of an acoustic background accompanying all daily events and not absorbing the attention of the listener. Satie's idea can be treated as one of the sources of inspiration for ambient music, an electronic music genre, whose name was introduced in the 1970s by a British composer, Brian Eno (born in 1948), who, like Satie, considered music as an element of the environment, perceived in the same way as the colour of light or the sound of falling rain. The main aim of this paper is to reconstruct and compare the main aspects of Satie's and Eno's visions of background music, geared to create acoustic background filling the public space. The discussion will be supplemented by a musical analysis of selected Satie's and Eno's pieces in both cases taking into account the performance context, audience reactions and the general problem of an inattentive way of listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most famous futuristic dystopia in the literature of the twentieth century is the novel of a British prose writer and essayist Aldous Huxley. "Brave New World" (1932) is the vision of a society that has reached a state of total organization and has achieved the ideal of universal happiness. One of the many tools of the social control in the hands of the authorities is the programmed "synthetic music", which meticulously fills every space. A similar image of background music appears in George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949). This is a very bleak vision of a society under total indoctrination, controlled, observed, hounded, misinformed and uncertain the next day. "Big Brother" - a chief controller is watching everyone, it is not possible to hide. Music provided by the authorities encroaches on the private space of the citizens and trickled from "telescreens" (which operate as both televisions and security cameras) at their homes. In both cases background music, woven into the machinery of social engineering, is a tool of manipulation, which has led to the "creation" of calm, predictable, homogeneous and obedient individuals. Does the vision of acoustic engineering created in the novels of Huxley and Orwell also apply to the modern times? The aim of the present paper is an attempt to answer the above question by analyzing the functions of background music in modern culture dominated by media and ubiquitous music. In this context the special attention will be paid to the specific role of acoustic sphere in the modern commercial places, in which music is to contribute to enforce certain behaviors, so that the recipient could better adjust themselves to the "consumption conveyor". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short paper-extended abstract the new approach to generation of electronic background music has been presented. The Generative Electronic Background Music System (GEBMS) has been located between other related approaches within the musical algorithm positioning framework proposed by Woller et al. The music composition process is performed by a number of mini-models parameterized by further described properties. The mini-models generate fragments of musical patterns used in output composition. Musical pattern and output generation are controlled by container for the mini-models - a host-model. General mechanism has been presented including the example of the synthesized output compositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays music comprises a vital element of individually shaped acoustic human environment and appears in the public space, often as an acoustic wallpaper imposed on a listener. The aim of the paper will be to present the most significant aspects of the debate on the presence of background music in the public space in Poland, initiated in the 1960s by one of the major composers of the 20th century - Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) and recalled in 2013 (in the year of celebration of the centenary of his birth). His opposition to polluting the environment with pseudo music inspired the creation of manifesto ("LUTOSLAWSKI 2013 MANIFESTO") whose aim is to start the discussion about the ubiquity of music and noise in everyday life. In the context of contemporary situation in Poland the special attention will be paid to the problem of using music in the commercial context (as a part of modern and specially designed servicescape environment and audiomarketing strategy delivered by professional companies). Thanks to such an attitude, a synthetic and multidimensional presentation of one of the most intriguing problems of the contemporary acoustic ecology will be feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background music is one of inseparable and indispensable elements in video games. It is considered as one of the aesthetic elements that contributes to players' enjoyment. This research is a part of ludo-musicology studies, which aims to investigate the effect of background music on the players' immersion, including sense of spatial presence, and emotions during the game. Participants were assigned in groups to play the same virtual social game experience (VSGE) two times - one time with their headphones on, and the second time without any headphones. Every game lasted for 15-20 minutes. After the experiments, participants were asked to fill questionnaires to compare both experiences regarding the immersion, spatial presence, and the emotions they feel during the game using Likert scales. To validate the participants' answers, we held a forum group discussion (FGD) consisting of 5 participants to gain deeper understanding regarding the causes that support the players' immersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the use of background music for increasing the commercial effectiveness and appreciation of television. It states that an exposure to a product and inserted music adds a preference for the product. It mentions that music provides a positive impact on the mind of human beings. It further focuses on the effect of various kinds of music on human behavior including melancholic music and high beat music.

Previous research (North, Hargreaves & McKendrick, 1999) showed that background music with particular geographical associations induce consumers in a supermarket to buy wine from the respective country. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings in an online shopping environment. Participants selected wine in an online wine shop with one of four background music conditions (French, South-African, South-American, no music). Results showed that the mean number of music-congruent wines chosen (e.g., South-African wine in the South African music condition) was significantly higher compared to the number of music-incongruent wines chosen. Further analyses suggest that this effect is due to the music-induced increased accessibility of geographical associations, which in turn primes the selection of products that fit with these geographical associations. Our findings indicate that, just as in physical stores, music is an influential atmospheric cue that exerts significant effects on online consumer behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]