A Critical Survey on Music Emotion Recognition Techniques for Music Information Retrieval

This paper surveys the various aspects of automatic emotion recognition in music. Music is oftentimes referred to as a “language of emotion” [1], and it is natural for us to categorize music in terms of its emotional associations. Myriad features, such as harmony, timbre, interpretation, and lyrics affect emotion, and the mood of a piece may also change over its duration. When compared to other music information retrieval tasks (e.g., genre identification), the identification of musical mood is still in its early stages, though it has received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper we explore a wide range of research in music emotion recognition, particularly focusing on methods that use contextual text information (e.g., websites, tags, and lyrics) and content-based approaches, as well as systems combining multiple feature domains.