Using Tags to Select Stimuli in the Study of Music and Emotion

Abstract

A wealth of literature on musical emotion exists, including investigation of the use of tags to classify musical emotions. However, the relationship between musical emotions and human annotated information is still unclear. Likewise, the understanding of the differences between induced emotion (also known as felt emotion) and perceived emotion (also known as expressed emotion) is at an early stage. In previous work, lists of songs labelled with one of the four basic emotion tags “happy”, “sad”, “angry” and “relaxed” were retrieved from Last.FM, and audio excerpts were fetched from 7Digital.com. In this study, we asked listeners to rate musical excerpts with the perceived or induced emotion fitting the excerpt. 80 excerpts (20 for each of the four emotions considered) were rated by 40 participants from various backgrounds and levels of musical expertise. The results show that in majority of the selected songs the tags agreed more closely with the ratings of perceived emotion than induced emotion. In addition, each induced emotion was highly correlated with its corresponding perceived emotion and induced anger can also be very distinct from its perceived ratings. However, the participants' emotional judgements were not related to measured cultural or musical factors.