Title: Impact of Intervals on the Emotional Effect in Western Music,
Abstract: 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.