Understanding emotion through drawings comparison between hearing-impaired people and people with normal hearing abilities

With the purpose of building a performance assistant system with visual cues for hearing-impaired people and people with normal hearing abilities to play music together, we need to better understand how hearing-impaired people express and understand music with visual assistance. We have conducted a series of experiments to determine how hearing-impaired people understand an emotion in a drum performance from its intended emotion. These experiments showed that communication based on emotion through musical performance is possible. Therefore we need to know the practical applications for a visual interface. In this paper, we describe an experiment that determines how hearing-impaired people understand an emotion in small simple drawings from its intended emotion. The results suggest that there are similarities in recognizing emotions between hearing-impaired people and people with normal hearing abilities.