A Cross-cultural Study of Music Mood Perception between American and Chinese Listeners

Music mood has been recognized as an important access point for music and many online music services support browsing by mood. However, how people judge music mood has not been well studied in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) domain. In particular, people's cultural background is often assumed to be an important factor in music mood perception, but this assumption has not been verified by empirical studies. This paper reports on a study comparing mood judgments on a set of 30 songs by American and Chinese people. Results show that mood judgments do indeed differ between American and Chinese respondents. Furthermore, respondents’ mood judgments tended to agree more with other respondents from the same culture than those from the other group. Both the song characteristics (e.g., genre, lyrical or instrumental) and the non-cultural background of the respondents (e.g., age, gender, familiarity with the songs) were analyzed to further examine the difference in mood judgments. Findings of this study help further our understanding on how cultural background affects mood perception. Also discussed in this paper are implications for designing MIR systems for cross-cultural music mood classification and recommendation.