STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF MUSICAL FEATURES FOR EMOTIONAL SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIATION IN HUMAN AND AI DATABASES

Abstract

Understanding the structural features of perceived musical emotions is crucial for various applications, including content generation and mood-driven playlists. This study performs a comparative statistical analysis to examine the association of a set of musical features with emotions, described using adjectives. The analysis uses two datasets containing rock and pop musical fragments, categorized as human-generated and AI-generated. Focusing on four emotional adjectives (happy, sad, angry, tender-gentle) representing each valence-arousal plane's quadrant, we analyzed semantic differential meanings reported as symmetric pairs for all possible combinations of quadrants through diagonals, vertical, and horizontal axes. The results obtained were discussed based on Livingstone's circular representation of emotional features in music. Our findings demonstrate that the human and AI-generated datasets could be considered equivalent for diagonal symmetries, while horizontal and vertical symmetries show discrepancies. Furthermore, we assessed significant separability for both happy-sad and angry-tender pairs in the human dataset. In contrast, the AI-generated music exhibits a strong differentiation mainly in the angry-gentle pair. (c) 2024. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original.