Correlation of gestural musical audio cues and perceived expressive qualities

An empirical study on the perceived semantic quality of musical content and its relationship with perceived structural audio features is presented. In a first study, subjects had to judge a variety of musical excerpts using adjectives describing different emotive/affective/expressive qualities of music. Factor analysis revealed three dimensions, related to valence, activity and interest. In a second study, semantic judgements were then compared with automated and manual structural descriptions of the musical audio signal. Applications of the results in domains of audio-mining, interactive multimedia and brain research are straightforward