Audio Features for Music Emotion Recognition: A Survey

The design of meaningful audio features is a key need to advance the state-of-the-art in music emotion recognition (MER). This article presents a survey on the existing emotionally-relevant computational audio features, supported by the music psychology literature on the relations between eight musical dimensions (melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, tone color, expressivity, texture and form) and specific emotions. Based on this review, current gaps and needs are identified and strategies for future research on feature engineering for MER are proposed, namely ideas for computational audio features that capture elements of musical form, texture and expressivity that should be further researched. Previous MER surveys offered broad reviews, covering topics such as emotion paradigms, approaches for the collection of ground-truth data, types of MER problems and overviewing different MER systems. On the contrary, our approach is to offer a deep and specific review on one key MER problem: the design of emotionally-relevant audio features.