Music Emotion Recognition using Chord Progressions

The chord progression is a fundamental building block in music which sketches the overall mood of a song. Many composers compose music by first deciding chord progressions as a structure and then adding melody and details. Despite its importance, it is rarely used as an emotional feature in music emotion recognition. Few previous works considered chords or intervals as features but the progression or transition of chords were ignored. In this work, we explore the effect of chord progressions in music emotion recognition. We collected music database and extracted features to form an emotion recognition model. The chord progression is then detected from each song, and its effectiveness is showed using cross-validation. The results show that chord progressions have influence in music emotion, especially valence.