Humans Sound Like Apes

Affective/Hack Science Initiative

Team: Chiara Esposito, Eeva-Liisa Puhakka, Franziska Lippoldt, Nenad Popov, Pablo Rojas,

The project “Humans Sound Like Apes” addresses the field of affective sciences in humans and animals. We are interested in the way mankind extrapolates human centered academic terminology (e.g. from psychology) to the natural world.

We illustrate this by linking the output of face/emotion recognition software to sounds made by animals experiencing an “equivalent” emotion. This project is part of the local community and result of the Science Hack Day Berlin. We built a strong multidisciplinary team comprised of specialists in fields ranging from programming to arts, psychology and science.

We used a public API already available for face and emotion recognition and adapted it to our needs with the use of programming and hacking. The sounds were obtained from scientific studies done by researchers while studying “animal emotions” in the lab and the field. The final hack hallmarks an interactive activity showcasing scientifically relevant data and state of the art technologies.