Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts- P11: The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player and online games, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created a new form of entertainment and art, which attracts and absorbs their participants. The fantastic success of this new field has influenced the development of the new digital entertainment industry and related products and services, which has impacted every aspect of our lives. | 292 J. Zhou and L. Xiao Music Visualization Tension Visualization Approach The purpose of music visualization is to take advantage of the strong patternrecognition abilities of the human visual system to reveal similarities patterns and correlations among a large collection of music. The typical procedure of music visualization is as follows 1. Automatically extract content information from music stored in digital audio format. 2. Render the extracted information visually. Currently in the 1st step low level features are used to represent the content information of music. For example the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients MFCCs is frequently employed to describe the timbre related information and the Fluctuation Pattern is utilized to represent the rhythm information 1 . And in the second step the extracted features dimensionality is linearly . PCA-based techniques 2 or non-linearly . SOM-based techniques 1 reduced so that they can be displayed in a 2D or 3D space. One problem of such visualization techniques which would lower the users experience of interacting is that users don t know what the x-axis and the y-axis represent. When the SOM-based techniques are applied since the mapping is nonlinear it s not possible to label the axes. And when the PCA-based techniques are used although we know the two dimensions would correspond to the first two principal components of the extracted low level feature users still can t understand the meaning because they cannot be explained semantically. To solve this problem high level features should be mapped to the axes instead of low level features. The tension visualization is just such a highlevel mapping technique. It derives the content information which could affect the tension of listener and then map them to x and y axes respectively. One of the most important characteristics of music is the powerful emotional effect. Humans often react to music emotionally. A study about the effect of different type of music on
