A cross-cultural study of mood in K-POP Songs

Abstract

Prior research suggests that music mood is one of the most important criteria when people look for music – but the perception of mood may be subjective and can be influenced by many factors including the listeners’ cultural background. In recent years, the number of studies of music mood perceptions by various cultural groups and of automated mood classification of music from different cultures has been increasing. However, there has yet to be a well-established testbed for evaluating cross-cultural tasks in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Moreover, most existing datasets in MIR consist mainly of Western music and the cultural backgrounds of the annotators were mostly not taken into consideration or were limited to one cultural group. In this study, we built a collection of 1,892 K-pop (Korean Pop) songs with mood annotations collected from both Korean and American listeners, based on three different mood models. We analyze the differences and similarities between the mood judgments of the two listener groups, and propose potential MIR tasks that can be evaluated on this dataset. © Xiao Hu, Jin Ha Lee, Kahyun Choi, J. Stephen Downie.