FEELTRACE

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FEELTRACE

• Leaders
• Ellen Douglas-Cowie and Cate Cox

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Overview

• Feeltrace is a computer program which allows
  listeners/viewers to track the perceived
  emotional content of a stimulus in real time in a
  two dimensional space
• The dimensions are activation (active to passive)
  and evaluation (positive to negative)
• Developed by Roddy Cowie (with Marc Schroeder,
  Martin Sawey, Ellen Douglas-Cowie, Edelle
  McMahon, and Suzie Savvidou)

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The Concept

• Description and analysis of real life emotional
  interchanges means coming to terms with two key
  issues
• Gradation - spontaneous speech is generally
  characterised by emotional shading rather than
  episodes of fullblown archetypal emotion
• Variation over time - emotional shading of
  everyday speech is rarely constant
• FEELTRACE is designed to let observers track an
  emotional interchange as they perceive it, taking
  full account of gradation and variation over
  time
• FEELTRACE function is to record the way the signs
  are perceived by reasonably representative
  observers

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From Concept to Program

• FEELTRACE is based on a 2 dimensional
  representation of emotion - a
• representation derived from psychology
• The activation dimension measures how dynamic the
  emotional state is the
• evaluation dimension measures the
  positive/negative feeling associated with the
  state
• Research suggests that the space is naturally
  circular, i.e. states at limit of emotional
  intensity define a circle, with alert neutrality
  at the centre
• To turn those ideas into a recording tool, the
  space was represented by a circle on a computer
  screen
• Observers describe perceived emotional state by
  moving a pointer (in the
• form of a disc) to the appropriate point in the
  circle, using a mouse

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The program

• Feeltrace written in Visual Basic
• Can be used on audio data alone, video data alone
  or on audio-visual data
• Feeltrace software allows several variants of
  program to be run
• Default version presents activation-evaluation
  space in form of a circle with landmark words
  placed at strategic points
• Additional options include presenting the
  dimensions in the form of a square with or
  without words
• Data from Feeltrace are stored as text files
• Each line in the textfile has 3 numbers
  timecode, evaluation coordinate at that time,
  activation coordinate at that time
• Prototypes tested, and refinements made -colour
  coding the pointer, presenting key emotion words
  as landmarks in the space, developing an
  induction procedure to introduce observers to the
  system
• An experiment assessed the reliability of the
  developed system

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The Feeltrace Display

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Feeltrace in Operation
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Cont.
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Aim of Practical

• To train you to use Feeltrace
• To show its capabilities and potential