The Perception of Emotion in the Singing Voice: The Understanding of Music Mood for Music Organisation

With the increased usage of internet based services and the mass of digital content now available online, the organisation of such content has become a major topic of interest both commercially and within academic research. The addition of emotional understanding for the content is a relevant parameter not only for music classification within digital libraries but also for improving users experiences, via services including automated music recommendation. Despite the singing voice being well-known for the natural communication of emotion, it is still unclear which specific musical characteristics of this signal are involved such affective expressions. The presented study investigates which musical parameters of singing relate to the emotional content, by evaluating the perception of emotion in electronically manipulated a cappella audio samples. A group of 24 individuals participated in a perception test evaluating the emotional dimensions of arousal and valence of 104 sung instances. Key results presented indicate that the rhythmic-melodic contour is potentially related to the perception of arousal whereas musical syntax and tempo can alter the perception of valence.