Cross-cultural Music Mood Classification: A Comparison on English and Chinese Songs

Most existing studies on music mood classification have been focusing on Western music while little research has investigated whether mood categories, audio features, and classification models developed from Western music are applicable to non-Western music. This paper attempts to answer this question through a comparative study on English and Chinese songs. Specifically, a set of Chinese pop songs were annotated using an existing mood taxonomy developed for English songs. Six sets of audio features commonly used on Western music (e.g., timbre, rhythm) were extracted from both Chinese and English songs, and mood classification performances based on these feature sets were compared. In addition, experiments were conducted to test the generalizability of classification models across English and Chinese songs. Results of this study shed light on cross-cultural applicability of research results on music mood classification.