Music-to-Facial Expressions: Emotion-Based Music Visualization for the Hearing Impaired

While music is made to convey messages and emotions, auditory music is not equally accessible to everyone. Music visualization is a common approach to augment the listening experiences of the hearing users and to provide music experiences for the hearing-impaired. In this paper, we present a music visualization system that can turn the input of a piece of music into a series of facial expressions representative of the continuously changing sentiments in the music. The resulting facial expressions, recorded as action units, can later animate a static virtual avatar to be emotive synchronously with the music.