Expression of Emotion by Hearing-Impaired People through Playing of Drum Set

摘要

The love of music is common among human beings, not only for people with normal hearing abilities but also for the hearing-impaired wishing to actively enjoy music. The purpose of our project is to design and build a system with performance visualization to assist in a cooperative performance for the hearing-impaired. Before the design process, we conducted an experiment with some hearing-impaired people, because we needed to understand how they knew, used, enjoyed, and felt about music. Since users of our system will have fewer musical experiences, the experiment does not measure musical correctness in their performances. With the experiment we tried to evaluate their potential ability to express emotion with music. For the experiment, we used eleven hearing-impaired people, all college students, and had them play a set of drums associated with one of the intended emotions (joy, sadness, anger, or fear). An analysis of the performances for each emotion showed that in general, the performances by the hearing-impaired were similar to those of people with normal hearing abilities. This implied that we would be able to design a system not only for the hearing-impaired, but also as a system with a universal design for both people with no hearing difficulties and the hearing-impaired.