A Study of Cultural Dependence of Perceived Mood in Greek Music

Several algorithms have been developed in the music information retrieval community for predicting mood in music in order to facilitate organising and accessing large audio collections. Little attention has been paid however to how perceived emotion depends on cultural factors, such as listeners’ acculturation or familiarity with musical background or language. In this study, we examine this dependence in the context of Greek music. A large representative database of Greek songs has been created and sampled observing predefined criteria such as the balance between Eastern and Western influenced musical genres. Listeners were then asked to rate songs according to their perceived mood. We collected continuous ratings of arousal and valence for short song excerpts and also asked participants to select a mood tag from a controlled mood vocabulary that best described the music. We analysed the consistency of ratings between Greek and non-Greek listeners and the relationships between the categorical and dimensional representations of emotions. Our results show that there is a greater agreement in listener’s judgements with Greek background compared to the group with varying background. These findings suggest valuable implications on the future development of mood prediction systems.