This was an extremely hectic week. The teaching assistants(TAs) surprised us on Sunday, informing us that our professor wanted us to come up with a project from scratch, and he wanted one ASAP. So, we had no choice but to start the entire ideation process to come up with an idea related to music and emotion, which is what our theme is about. We came up with several ideas in the beginning, and we had to do research on the feasability of the idea, what kinds of similar products are in the market, who the specific target audience is, etc. Our first idea revolved around using a facial recognition (specifically emotion detection) program through openCV to detect the emotions of the user, which would be done through the laptop’s camera. The idea was basically recommending the user different types and genres of music that ideally corresponded to the user’s current emotion and activity. This was at that moment our best and most substianted idea, and we had thought about almost everything down to its minute details. However, through careful deliberational and extensive discussions with our TAs, we eventually decided against that idea. The TAs then gave us another day to come up with some new ideas, which was definitely challenging as we had already exhausted 3-4 proper ideas by then.
After some intensive brainwrecking, we came up with another idea that everyone liked and agreed upon. The new idea was about helping children of a young age relate music to emotions. Upon close examination, we realised that the majority of people are unable to relate music to emotions in a precise and deliberate manner. Sure, most people can paint with a broad brush and say that a certain piece of music made them feel happy, or sad, or excited, but very few are actually able to for example, pinpont a specific chord in the song that relates to a specific emotion, and rightfully so as these are things typically taught in grade 5 music theory and above. On the other hand, people are easily able to identify how certain colours are supposed to make you feel. Red typically corresponds to angry, yellow corresponds to happy, blue to sad, and so on and so forth. We figured that if people were exposed to the relationship between music and emotions from a young age, they would have a better connection to music, and would open them up to a whole new form of appreciation that they would never else be able to obtain. The way we wanted to accomplish this was to take something that young children do that relates to emotions, and combine it with pieces of music. What we came up with was to use eBooks, which feature a whole trove of children illustrated books and stories, and whose popularity is as of now on the rise. We would take these eBooks, analyse their content, and pick a song best suited for the particular themes and emotions that the story emcompasses. This idea eventually became the one that we stuck with and are currently working on.
