Emotional descriptors for map-based access to music libraries

Abstract

Apart from genre- and artist-based organization, emotions are one of the most frequently used characteristics to describe and thus potentially organize music. Emotional descriptors may serve as additional labels to access and interact with music libraries. This paper reports on a user study evaluating a range of emotional descriptors from the PANAS-X schedule for their usefulness to describe pieces of music. It further investigates their potential as labels for SOM-based maps for music collections, analyzing the differences for labels agreed upon by a larger group of people versus strictly personalized labellings of maps due to different interpretations by individual users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.