The Influence of Audio Features on Gaze Behavior
* Presenting author
Abstract:
In 2020, we conducted an eye-tracking study with 44 subjects to investigate the influences of musical tempo but also some visual manipulations on gaze behavior (Mühlhans, Klooss & Stowasser, 2020). While the visual manipulations only affected some subjective ratings, a medium effect (d = 0.41-0.5) on average fixation durations was observed for tempo differences, using own compositions with a tempo of either 90 or 160 bpm. This effect has been found previously (Coutrout et al.,2012; Schäfer & Fachner, 2015). However, because gaze data differed widely within all other stimuli - which largely consisted of concert recordings of classical or jazz pieces - we extracted a variety of audio features to find possible further correlates with gaze data. Unsurprisingly, some apparent correlations could be found, which, however, need further investigation due to the general variability of the stimuli. Some of the differences could be explained by the movements of the artists in the videos, which is why these were examined with a special analysis tool (Jensenius, 2005). However, even if movements in videos strongly influenced gaze behavior, our data also suggest an influence of acoustic features like SpectralFlux, EventDensity or PercussiveEnergy.