Towards User-Aware Music Information Retrieval: Emotional and Color Perception of Music

This chapter presents our findings on emotional and color perception of music. It emphasizes the importance of user-aware music information retrieval (MIR) and the advantages that research on emotional processing and interaction between multiple modalities brings to the understanding of music and its users. Analyses of results show that correlations between emotions, colors and music are largely determined by context. There are differences between emotion-color associations and valence-arousal ratings in non-music and music contexts, with the effects of genre preferences evident for the latter. Participants were able to differentiate between perceived and induced musical emotions. Results also show how associations between individual musical emotions affect their valence-arousal ratings. We believe these findings contribute to the development of user-aware MIR systems and open further possibilities for innovative applications in MIR and affective computing in general.