Biometric responses to music-rich segments in films: the CDVPlex

Summarising or generating trailers for films or movies involves finding the highlights within those films, those segments where we become most afraid, happy, sad, annoyed, excited, etc. In this paper we explore three questions related to automatic detection of film highlights by measuring the physiological responses of viewers of those films. Firstly, whether emotional highlights can be detected through viewer biometrics, secondly whether individuals watching a film in a group experience similar emotional reactions as others in the group and thirdly whether the presence of music in a film correlates with the occurrence of emotional highlights. We analyse the results of an experiment known as the CDVPlex, where we monitored and recorded physiological reactions from people as they viewed films in a controlled cinema-like environment. A selection of films were manually annotated for the locations of their emotive contents. We then studied the physiological peaks identified among participants while viewing the same film and how these correlated with emotion tags and with music. We conclude that these are highly correlated and that music-rich segments of a film do act as a catalyst in stimulating viewer response, though we don't know what exact emotions the viewers were experiencing. The results of this work could impact the way in which we index movie content on PVRs for example, paying special significance to movie segments which are most likely to be highlights.