Conveying Audience Emotions through Humanoid Robot Gestures to an Orchestra during a Live Musical Exhibition

In the last twenty years, robotics have been applied in manyheterogeneous contexts. Among them, the use of humanoid robots duringmusical concerts have been proposed and investigated by many authors.In this paper, we propose a contribution in the area of robotics applicationin music, consisting of a system for conveying audience emotionsduring a live musical exhibition, by means of a humanoid robot. In particular,we provide all spectators with a mobile app, by means of whichthey can select a specific color while listening to a piece of music (act).Each color is mapped to an emotion, and the audience preferences arethen processed in order to select the next act to be played. This decision,based on the overall emotion felt by the audience, is then communicatedby the robot through body gestures to the orchestra. Our first resultsshow that spectators enjoy such kind of interactive musical performance,and are encouraging for further investigations.