Impact of Intervals on the Emotional Effect in Western Music

Every art form ultimately aims to invoke an emotional response over the audience, and music is no different. While the precise perception of music is a highly subjective topic, there is an agreement in the "feeling" of a piece of music in broad terms. Based on this observation, in this study, we aimed to determine the emotional feeling associated with short passages of music; specifically by analyzing the melodic aspects. We have used the dataset put together by Eerola et. al. which is comprised of labeled short passages of film music. Our initial survey of the dataset indicated that other than "happy" and "sad" labels do not possess a melodic structure. We transcribed the main melody of the happy and sad tracks and used the intervals between the notes to classify them. Our experiments have shown that treating a melody as a bag-of-intervals do not possess any predictive power whatsoever, whereas counting intervals with respect to the key of the melody yielded a classifier with 85% accuracy.