Are Expressions for Music Emotions the Same Across Cultures?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Celen, Elif, van Rijn, Pol, Lee, Harin, Jacoby, Nori
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Celen, Elif
van Rijn, Pol
Lee, Harin
Jacoby, Nori
author_facet Celen, Elif
van Rijn, Pol
Lee, Harin
Jacoby, Nori
contents Music evokes profound emotions, yet the universality of emotional descriptors across languages remains debated. A key challenge in cross-cultural research on music emotion is biased stimulus selection and manual curation of taxonomies, predominantly relying on Western music and languages. To address this, we propose a balanced experimental design with nine online experiments in Brazil, the US, and South Korea, involving N=672 participants. First, we sample a balanced set of popular music from these countries. Using an open-ended tagging pipeline, we then gather emotion terms to create culture-specific taxonomies. Finally, using these bottom-up taxonomies, participants rate emotions of each song. This allows us to map emotional similarities within and across cultures. Results show consistency in high arousal, high valence emotions but greater variability in others. Notably, machine translations were often inadequate to capture music-specific meanings. These findings together highlight the need for a domain-sensitive, open-ended, bottom-up emotion elicitation approach to reduce cultural biases in emotion research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_08744
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Expressions for Music Emotions the Same Across Cultures?
Celen, Elif
van Rijn, Pol
Lee, Harin
Jacoby, Nori
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Music evokes profound emotions, yet the universality of emotional descriptors across languages remains debated. A key challenge in cross-cultural research on music emotion is biased stimulus selection and manual curation of taxonomies, predominantly relying on Western music and languages. To address this, we propose a balanced experimental design with nine online experiments in Brazil, the US, and South Korea, involving N=672 participants. First, we sample a balanced set of popular music from these countries. Using an open-ended tagging pipeline, we then gather emotion terms to create culture-specific taxonomies. Finally, using these bottom-up taxonomies, participants rate emotions of each song. This allows us to map emotional similarities within and across cultures. Results show consistency in high arousal, high valence emotions but greater variability in others. Notably, machine translations were often inadequate to capture music-specific meanings. These findings together highlight the need for a domain-sensitive, open-ended, bottom-up emotion elicitation approach to reduce cultural biases in emotion research.
title Are Expressions for Music Emotions the Same Across Cultures?
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08744