Investigation of the relationships between audio features and induced emotions in Contemporary Western music

Abstract : This paper focuses on emotion recognition and under-standing in Contemporary Western music. The study seeks to investigate the relationship between perceived emotion and musical features in the fore-mentioned mus-ical genre. A set of 27 Contemporary music excerpts is used as stimuli to gather responses from both musicians and non-musicians which are then mapped on an emo-tional plane in terms of arousal and valence dimensions. Audio signal analysis techniques are applied to the corpus and a base feature set is obtained. The feature set contains characteristics ranging from low-level spectral and tem-poral acoustic features to high-level contextual features. The feature extraction process is discussed with particular emphasis on the interaction between acoustical and struc-tural parameters. Statistical relations between audio fea-tures and emotional ratings from psychological experi-ments are systematically investigated. Finally, a linear model is created using the best features and the mean ratings and its prediction efficiency is evaluated and dis-cussed.