THE EFFECT OF VISUAL MODALITIES ON HUMAN PERCEPTION OF EMOTION FROM MUSIC

As the music databases grow, the number of ways to create playlists has also increased. Researchers have been studying to find the easier way to categorize music in order for people to listen more conveniently. One solution is categorization of music based on emotion. While researchers have only focused on improving the accuracy of emotional categorization of music, they have disregarded the possibility of improving human perception of emotion from music. Although the existence of platonic ideal of emotional response to music is still doubtable, we believe that there must exist a better interpretation of music in emotional context. In this paper, we intended to find out in what ways the addition of visual modality can affect our perception of emotion from music. After categorizing music into emotions using a MLR technique, we collected two different groups of emotional responses from subjects. One was from people who listened to songs and the other was from people who listened to songs with visual stimulations. We compared the data and found that when people were exposed with visual stimulation, their emotional responses to music were more closely correlated with the emotion model that we have constructed.