Modelling Emotions in Music: Advances in Conceptual, Contextual and Validity Issues

Abstract

Modelling emotion recognition and induction by music has garnered increased attention during the last years. The present work puts together observations of the issues that need attention in order to make advances in music emotion recognition. These are divided into conceptual, contextual and data validity issues. Within each issue, the central dilemmas are discussed and promising further avenues are presented. In conceptual issues, significant discrepancies in the terminologies and choices for emotion focus and models exist. In contextual issues, the primary area of improvement is incorporating music and user contexts into emotion recognition. For the validity of data, reliable estimation of mid-level musical concepts require significant attention and optimal combination of studies with high validity and high stimulus quantity is the key to robust music emotion recognition models.