Understanding Emotion in Raag: An Empirical Study of Listener Responses

A survey of emotion in North Indian classical music was undertaken to determine the type and consistency of emotional responses to raag. Participants listened to five oneminute raag excerpts and recorded their emotional responses after each. They were asked to describe the emotions each excerpt evoked and then to adjust six different sliders indicating the degree to which they felt the following: happy, sad, peaceful, tense, romantic, longing. A total of 280 responses were received. We find that both free-response and quantitative judgments of emotions are significantly different for each raag and quite consistent across listeners. We hypothesized that the primary predictors of emotion in these excerpts would be pitch-class distribution, pitch-class dyad entropy, overall sensory dissonance, and note density. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine the most important factors, their relative importance, and their total predictive value (R2 ). The features in combination ex...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CMMR
• Authors: Parag Chordia, Alex Rae
• Keywords: CMMR 2007, Emotional Responses, Music, North Indian Classical Music, Oneminute Raag Excerpts