Psychophysiological measures of emotional response to romantic orchestral music and their musical and acoustic correlates

Konstantinos Trochidis, David Sears, Diêu Ly Trân, Stephen McAdams

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

This paper examines the induction of emotions while listening to Romantic orchestral music. The study seeks to explore the relationship between subjective ratings of felt emotion and acoustic and physiological features. We employed 75 musical excerpts as stimuli to gather responses of excitement and pleasantness from 20 participants. During the experiments, physiological responses of the participants were measured, including blood volume pulse (BVP), skin conductance (SC), respiration rate (RR) and facial electromyography (EMG). A set of acoustic features was derived related to dynamics, harmony, timbre and rhythmic properties of the music stimuli. Based on the measured physiological signals, a set of physiological features was also extracted. The feature extraction process is discussed with particular emphasis on the interaction between acoustical and physiological parameters. Statistical relations among audio, physiological features and emotional ratings from psychological experiments were systematically investigated. Finally, a forward step-wise multiple linear regression model (MLR) was employed using the best features, and its prediction efficiency was evaluated and discussed. The results indicate that merging acoustic and physiological modalities substantially improves prediction of participants' ratings of felt emotion compared to the results using the modalities in isolation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFrom Sounds to Music and Emotions - 9th International Symposium, CMMR 2012, Revised Selected Papers
Pages44-57
Number of pages14
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: Jun 19 2012Jun 22 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7900 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period6/19/126/22/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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