An approach of genetic programming for music emotion classification

In this paper, we suggest a new approach of genetic programming for music emotion classification. Our approach is based on Thayer’s arousal-valence plane which is one of representative human emotion models. Thayer’s plane which says human emotions is determined by the psychological arousal and valence. We map music pieces onto the arousal-valence plane, and classify the music emotion in that space. We extract 85 acoustic features from music signals, rank those by the information gain and choose the top k best features in the feature selection process. In order to map music pieces in the feature space onto the arousal-valence space, we apply genetic programming. The genetic programming is designed for finding an optimal formula which maps given music pieces to the arousal-valence space so that music emotions are effectively classified. k-NN and SVM methods which are widely used in classification are used for the classification of music emotions in the arousal-valence space. For verifying our method, we compare with other six existing methods on the same music data set. With this experiment, we confirm the proposed method is superior to others.