Expressed music mood classification compared with valence and arousal ratings

Abstract

Mood is an important aspect of music and knowledge of mood can be used as a basic feature in music recommender and retrieval systems. A listening experiment was carried out establishing ratings for various moods and a number of attributes, e.g., valence and arousal. The analysis of these data covers the issues of the number of basic dimensions in music mood, their relation to valence and arousal, the distribution of moods in the valence-arousal plane, distinctiveness of the labels, and appropriate (number of) labels for full coverage of the plane. It is also shown that subject-averaged valence and arousal ratings can be predicted from music features by a linear model. © 2012 den Brinker et al.; licensee Springer.