Touch Media: Investigating the Effects of Remote Touch on Music-based Emotion Elicitation

Touch is a contextual medium for affect conveyance. It is difficult to assign specific meanings to each instance of touch in isolation. However, when engaged within context, touch becomes a powerful and indispensable means for humans to convey feelings of love, concern, and sympathy. This paper explores how remote touch may influence one's affective experience of music, and how this experience is dependent on the relationship between the originator and recipient of the touch. For our study, we designed: (1) A mediated touch system that provides kinesthetic touches through an armband device that is controlled by changes in force applied to an input device, and (2) A touch-media system by which one can record and playback a co-temporal stream of touches with a track of music. We examined: (1) How remote touch may influence a touch recipient's experience of the music, and (2) how the recipients' affective experiences may depend on whether the touch is believed to be generated by intimates (familiar touch) versus by a music performer as part of a performance (unfamiliar touch)? Our study's results revealed that there is a significant correlation between the conditions (familiar, unfamiliar, and no touches) and song types (happy, sad) in both positive and negative affective experiences.