Mood tracking of musical compositions

Abstract

This paper presents a new strategy for the analysis of emotions contained within musical compositions. We present a method for tracking changing emotions during the course of a musical piece. The collected data allowed to determine the dominant emotion in the musical composition, present emotion histograms and construct maps visualizing the distribution of emotions in time. The amount of changes of emotions during a piece may be different, therefore we introduced a parameter evaluating the quantity of changes of emotions in a musical composition. The information obtained about the emotion in a piece made it possible to analyze a number of pieces, in particular the Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. This analysis has provided new knowledge about the compositions and the method of their emotional development. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.