The emotions that we perceive in music: the influence of language and lyrics comprehension on agreement
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for Music Emotion Recognition models by examining incremental factors like language and personal characteristics.
The study investigated how lyrics comprehension and listener language affect emotion perception in pop/rock music, finding that inter-rater agreement on emotions is influenced by understanding lyrics, with results quantified using Krippendorff's alpha coefficient.
In the present study, we address the relationship between the emotions perceived in pop and rock music (mainly in Euro-American styles with English lyrics) and the language spoken by the listener. Our goal is to understand the influence of lyrics comprehension on the perception of emotions and use this information to improve Music Emotion Recognition (MER) models. Two main research questions are addressed: 1. Are there differences and similarities between the emotions perceived in pop/rock music by listeners raised with different mother tongues? 2. Do personal characteristics have an influence on the perceived emotions for listeners of a given language? Personal characteristics include the listeners' general demographics, familiarity and preference for the fragments, and music sophistication. Our hypothesis is that inter-rater agreement (as defined by Krippendorff's alpha coefficient) from subjects is directly influenced by the comprehension of lyrics.