Musemo: Express Musical Emotion Based on Neural Network

Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering (Convergence of Science and Arts)Music elicits emotional responses, which enable people to empathize with the emotional states induced by music, experience changes in their current feelings, receive comfort, and relieve stress (Juslin & Laukka, 2004). Music emotion recognition (MER) is a field of research that extracts emotions from music through various systems and methods. Interest in this field is increasing as researchers try to use it for psychiatric purposes. In order to extract emotions from music, MER requires music and emotion labels for each music. Many MER studies use emotion labels created by non-music-specific psychologists such as Russell???s circumplex model of affects (Russell, 1980) and Ekman???s six basic emotions (Ekman, 1999). However, Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer suggest that emotions commonly used in music are subdivided into specific areas, rather than spread across the entire spectrum of emotions (Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008). Thus, existing MER studies have difficulties with the emotion labels that are not widely agreed through musicians and listeners. This study proposes a musical emotion recognition model ???Musemo??? that follows the Geneva emotion music scale proposed by music psychologists based on a convolution neural network. We evaluate the accuracy of the model by varying the length of music samples used as input of Musemo and achieved RMSE (root mean squared error) performance of up to 14.91%. Also, we examine the correlation among emotion labels by reducing the Musemo???s emotion output vector to two dimensions through principal component analysis. Consequently, we can get results that are similar to the study that Vuoskoski and Eerola analyzed for the Geneva emotion music scale (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011). We hope that this study could be expanded to inform treatments to comfort those in need of psychological empathy in modern society.clos

Emergentism and musicology: an alternative perspective to the understanding of dissonance.

In this paper we develop an approach to musicology within the discussion of emergentism. First of all, we claim that some theories of musicology could be insufficient in describing and explaining musical phenomena when emergent properties are not taken into account. Actually, musicology usually considers just syntactical elements, structures and processes and puts only a little emphasis, if any, over perceptual aspects of human hearing. On the other hand, recent research efforts are currently being directed towards an understanding of the emergent properties of auditory perception, especially in fields such as cognitive science. Such research leads to other views concerning old issues in musicology and could create a fruitful approach, filling the gap between musicology and auditory perception

Single chords convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners.

Previous research on music and emotions has been able to pinpoint many structural features conveying emotions. Empirical research on vertical harmony’s emotional qualities, however, has been rare. The main studies in harmony and emotions usually concern the horizontal aspects of harmony, ignoring emotional qualities of chords as such. An empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 269) evaluated pre-chosen chords on a 9-item scale of given emotional dimensions. 14 different chords (major, minor, diminished, augmented triads and dominant, major and minor seventh chords with inversions) were played with two distinct timbres (piano and strings). The results suggest significant differences in emotion perception across chords. These were consistent with notions about musical conventions, while providing novel data on how seventh chords affect emotion perception. The inversions and timbre also contributed to the evaluations. Moreover, certain chords played on the strings scored moderately high on the dimension of ‘nostalgia/longing,’ which is usually held as a musical emotion rising only from extra-musical connotations and conditioning, not intrinsically from the structural features of the music. The role of background variables to the results was largely negligible, suggesting the capacity of vertical harmony to convey distinct emotional qualities to both naïve and expert listeners

Assessing intonation skills in a tertiary music training programme

[Abstract]: Buttsworth, Fogarty, and Rorke (1993) reported the construction of a battery of tonal tests designed to assess intonation abilities. A subset of the tests in the battery predicted 36 per cent of final scores in an aural training subject in a tertiary music course. In the current study, the original battery of fourteen tests was reduced to six tests and administered three times throughout the academic year to a new sample (N = 87) of tertiary music students. Three research questions were investigated. Firstly, it was hypothesised that tests in the battery would discriminate among the different aural classes at USQ, which were grouped according to ability level. The results from discriminant function analyses provided strong support for this hypothesis. Secondly, it was hypothesised that students should improve their performance on the pitch battery across the three administrations. A repeated measures analysis of variance failed to find evidence of overall improvement. Finally, it was hypothesised that there would be significant differences on the intonation tests between musicians of different instrumental families. Again, no overall differences were found. The results indicated that intonation tests appear to tap an ability that (a) is not significantly modified by training, (b) is more or less the same across different instrument families, and (c) is related to success in music training programmes

Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces

The abstraction of musical structures (notes, melodies, chords, harmonic or rhythmic progressions, etc.) as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the great accomplishments of contemporary music theory. Building on this foundation, I generalize the concept of musical spaces as networks and derive functional principles of compositional design by the direct analysis of the network topology. This approach provides a novel framework for the analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures, and suggests a way to relate such measures to the human perception of different musical entities. Finally, the analysis of a single work or a corpus of compositions as complex networks provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process of a composer by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics techniques. Interpreting the latter as probabilistic randomness in the network, I develop novel compositional design frameworks that are central to my own artistic research