CENTRE FOR INFORMATICS AND SYSTEMS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF COIMBRA

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Publications

"Back in my day...": A Preliminary Study on the Differences in Generational Groups Perception of Musically-evoked Emotion

Publication . Louro, Pedro; Panda, Renato

The increasingly globalized world we live in today and the wide availability of music at our fingertips have led to more diverse musical tastes within younger generations than in older generations. Moreover, these disparities are still not well understood, and the extent to which they affect listeners' preferences and perception of music. Focusing on the latter, this study explores the differences in emotional perception of music between the Millennials and Gen Z generations. Interviews were conducted with six participants equally distributed between both generations by recording their listening experience and emotion perception on two previously compiled sets of songs representing each group. Significant differences between generations and possible contributing factors were found in the analysis of the conducted interviews. Findings point to differences in the perception of energy of songs with specific messages of suffering for love, as well as a tendency from the younger group to perceive a well-defined emotion in songs representing their generation in contrast to neutral responses from the other group. These findings are preliminary, and further studies are needed to understand their extent. Nevertheless, valuable insights can be extracted to improve music recommendation systems.

2024Conference object

Open access

Exploring Deep Learning Methodologies for Music Emotion Recognition

Publication . Louro, Pedro; Redinho, Hugo; Malheiro, Ricardo; Paiva, Rui Pedro; Panda, Renato

Classical machine learning techniques have dominated Music Emotion Recognition (MER). However, improvements have slowed down due to the complex and time-consuming task of handcrafting new emotionally relevant audio features. Deep Learning methods have recently gained popularity in the field because of their ability to automatically learn relevant features from spectral representations of songs, eliminating such necessity. Nonetheless, there are limitations, such as the need for large amounts of quality labeled data, a common problem in MER research. To understand the effectiveness of these techniques, a comparison study using various classical machine learning and deep learning methods was conducted. The results showed that using an ensemble of a Dense Neural Network and a Convolutional Neural Network architecture resulted in a state-of-the-art 80.20% F1-score, an improvement of around 5% considering the best baseline results, concluding that future research should take advantage of both paradigms, that is, conbining handcrafted features with feature learning.

2024Conference object

Open access