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Music evokes profound emotions, yet the universality of emotional descriptors across languages remains debated. A key challenge in cross-cultural research on music emotion is biased stimulus selection and manual curation of taxonomies, predominantly relying on Western music and languages. To address this, we propose a balanced experimental design with nine online experiments in Brazil, the US, and South Korea, involving N=672 participants. First, we sample a balanced set of popular music from these countries. Using an open-ended tagging pipeline, we then gather emotion terms to create culture-specific taxonomies. Finally, using these bottom-up taxonomies, participants rate emotions of each song. This allows us to map emotional similarities within and across cultures. Results show consistency in high arousal, high valence emotions but greater variability in others. Notably, machine translations were often inadequate to capture music-specific meanings. These findings together highlight the need for a domain-sensitive, open-ended, bottom-up emotion elicitation approach to reduce cultural biases in emotion research.

Vocal Bursts -- short, non-speech vocalizations that convey emotions, such as laughter, cries, sighs, moans, and groans -- are an often-overlooked aspect of speech emotion recognition, but an important aspect of human vocal communication. One barrier to study of these interesting vocalizations is a lack of large datasets. I am pleased to introduce the EmoGator dataset, which consists of 32,130 samples from 357 speakers, 16.9654 hours of audio; each sample classified into one of 30 distinct emotion categories by the speaker. Several different approaches to construct classifiers to identify emotion categories will be discussed, and directions for future research will be suggested. Data set is available for download from https://github.com/fredbuhl/EmoGator.

On a bitter, soul-shivering, damp, biting gray February day in Cleveland--that is to say, on a February day in Cleveland--a handless man is handling a nonexistent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand when his forearm was pulped in an industrial accident six years ago and had to be amputated. In an operation four years ago, a team of surgeons implanted a set of small translucent "interfaces" into the neural circuits of his upper arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab at a Veterans Administration hospital, the wires are hooked up directly to a prosthetic hand--plastic, flesh-colored, five-fingered, and articulated--that is affixed to what remains of his arm. The hand has more than a dozen pressure sensors within it, and their signals can be transformed by a computer into electric waves like those natural to the nervous system. Since, from the brain's point of view, his hand is still there, it needs only to be recalled to life. With the "stimulation" turned on--the electronic feed coursing from the sensors--Spetic feels nineteen distinct sensations in his artificial hand. Above all, he can feel pressure as he would with a living hand. "We don't appreciate how much of our behavior is governed by our intense sensitivity to pressure," Dustin Tyler, the fresh-faced principal investigator on the Cleveland project, says, observing Spetic closely. "We think of hot and cold, or of textures, silk and cotton. But some of the most important sensing we do with our fingers is to register incredibly minute differences in pressure, of the kinds that are necessary to perform tasks, which we grasp in a microsecond from the feel of the outer shell of the thing. We know instantly, just by touching, whether to gently squeeze the toothpaste or crush the can." With the new prosthesis, Spetic can sense the surface of a cherry in a way that allows him to stem it effortlessly and precisely, guided by what he feels, rather than by what he sees. Prosthetic hands like Spetic's tend to be super-strong, capable of forty pounds of pressure, so the risk of crushing an egg is real. The stimulation sensors make delicate tasks easy. Spetic comes into the lab every other week; the rest of the time he is busy pursuing a degree in engineering, which he has taken up while on disability.