A Categorical Approach for Recognizing Emotional Effects of Music

Abstract: Recently, digital music libraries have been developed and can be plainly accessed. Latest research showed that current organization and retrieval of music tracks based on album information are inefficient. Moreover, they demonstrated that people use emotion tags for music tracks in order to search and retrieve them. In this paper, we discuss separability of a set of emotional labels, proposed in the categorical emotion expression, using Fisher's separation theorem. We determine a set of adjectives to tag music parts: happy, sad, relaxing, exciting, epic and thriller. Temporal, frequency and energy features have been extracted from the music parts. It could be seen that the maximum separability within the extracted features occurs between relaxing and epic music parts. Finally, we have trained a classifier using Support Vector Machines to automatically recognize and generate emotional labels for a music part. Accuracy for recognizing each label has been calculated; where the results show that epic music can be recognized more accurately (77.4%), comparing to the other types of music.