Predicting Perceived Music Emotions with Respect to Instrument Combinations

Abstract

Music Emotion Recognition has attracted a lot of academic research work in recent years because it has a wide range of applications, including song recommendation and music visualization. As music is a way for humans to express emotion, there is a need for a machine to automatically infer the perceived emotion of pieces of music. In this paper, we compare the accuracy difference between music emotion recognition models given music pieces as a whole versus music pieces separated by instruments. To compare the models' emotion predictions, which are distributions over valence and arousal values, we provide a metric that compares two distribution curves. Using this metric, we provide empirical evidence that training Random Forest and Convolution Recurrent Neural Network with mixed instrumental music data conveys a better understanding of emotion than training the same models with music that are separated into each instrumental source.