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

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.