Improving Deep Learning Methodologies for Music Emotion Recognition

Music Emotion Recognition (MER) has traditionally relied on classical machine learning techniques. Progress on these techniques has plateaued due to the demanding process of crafting new, emotionally-relevant audio features. Recently, deep learning (DL) methods have surged in popularity within MER, due to their ability of automatically learning features from the input data. Nonetheless, these methods need large, high-quality labeled datasets, a well-known hurdle in MER studies. We present a comparative study of various classical and DL techniques carried out to evaluate these approaches. Most of the presented methodologies were developed by our team, if not stated otherwise. It was found that a combination of Dense Neural Networks (DNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieved an 80.20% F1-score, marking an improvement of approximately 5% over the best previous results. This indicates that future research should blend both manual feature engineering and automated feature learning to enhance results.