A histogram density modeling approach to music emotion recognition

Music emotion recognition is concerned with developing predictive models that comprehend the affective content of musical signals. Recently, a growing number of attempts has been made to model the music emotion as a probability distribution in the valence-arousal (VA) space to better account for the subjectivity. In this paper, we present a novel histogram density modeling approach that models the emotion distribution by a 2-D histogram over the quantized VA space and learns a set of latent histograms to predict the emotion probability density of a song from audio. The proposed model is free from parametric distribution assumptions over the VA space, easy to implement, and extremely fast to train. We also extend our model to deal with the temporal dynamics of time-varying emotion labels. Comprehensive performance study on two larger-scale datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art ones, but with much better training and testing efficiency.