New system can manipulate emotions to soothe her mood

If you don't know how to make things work in your relationship, try this novel digital audio platform that can manipulate your emotions to makes them sound more happier and settle the mood disorder for once and all.

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have created a digital audio platform that can modify the emotional tone of people's voices while they are talking, to make them sound happier, sadder or more fearful.

The results show that while listening to their altered voices, participants' emotional state change in accordance with the new emotion.

During the study, the participants read a short story aloud while hearing their own altered voice, sounding happier, sadder or more fearful, through a headset.

The team found that the participants were unaware that their voices were being manipulated, while their emotional state changed in accordance with the manipulated emotion portrayed.

This indicates that people do not always control their own voice to meet a specific goal and that people listen to their own voice to learn how they are feeling.

"This is the first evidence of direct feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain," said Petter Johansson, one of the authors from Lund University.

The emotional manipulations were created by digital audio processing algorithms that simulate acoustic components of emotional vocalisations.

The researchers believe this novel audio platform opens up many new areas of experimentation.

"Previously, this kind of emotion manipulation has not been done on running speech, only on recorded segments", explained lead author Jean-Julien Aucouturier from CNRS, France.

"We are making a version of the voice manipulation platform available as open-source on our website, and we invite anyone to download and experiment with the tools," he noted.

The platform could be used for therapeutic purposes, for example for mood disorders.

The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).