It's Not What They Play, It's What You Hear: Understanding Perceived vs. Induced Emotions in Hindustani Classical Music

Abstract

Music is an efficient medium to elicit and convey emotions. The comparison between perceived and induced emotions from western music has been widely studied. However, this relationship has not been studied from the perspective of Hindustani classical music. In this work, we explore the relationship between perceived and induced emotions with Hindustani classical music as our stimuli. We observe that there is little to no correlation between them, however, audio features help in distinguishing the increase or decrease in induced emotion quality. We also introduce a novel dataset which contains induced valence and arousal annotations for 18 Hindustani classical music songs. Furthermore, we propose a latent space representation based approach, that leads to a relative increase in F1 Score of 32.2% for arousal and 34.5% for valence classification, as compared to feature-based approaches for Hindustani classical music.