A comparison between continuous categorical emotion responses and Stimulus loudness parameters

This paper investigates the use of psychoacoustic loudness analysis as a method for determining the likely emotional responses of listeners to musical excerpts. 19 excerpts of music were presented to 86 participants (7 randomly chosen excerpts per participant) who were asked to rate the emotion category using the emotion-clock-face continuous response interface. The same excerpts were analysed with a loudness model, and time series results were summarised as both loudness median and standard deviation. Comparisons indicate that the median and standard deviation of loudness plays an important role in determining the emotion category responses.