Abstract

“…emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.”-Carl Gustav Jung This thesis presents the hypothesis that aesthetic forms of expression – such as music, painting, video – can be used for direct information delivery. In contrast to text or verbal narrative techniques, which require a conscious act of transcoding, these aesthetic forms stimulate more direct, emotional response. Such a hypothesis could open a new channel for the delivery of various types of information, providing us, in situations of information overload, with a background information channel, leaving our foreground concentrated on the more thought-demanding tasks. To develop a viable system based on the notion of using aesthetic forms of expression for direct information delivery, we need to develop the elements from which the system would consist. This research defines the "emon", a small discrete unit of aesthetic expression, which generates an expected emotional response that can affect human behavior. The study is currently restricted to the domain of music, with

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