Musical Emotion

The emotional content perceived in, or felt in response to, a piece of music, typically analysed along dimensions such as valence and arousal or via categorical labels (cheerful, tense, calm, sad, energetic, love, dreamy). Musical emotion arises from low-level acoustic features—tempo, loudness, brightness, spectral centroid, roughness, harmonic structure—that listeners integrate into emotional judgments. In accessibility research, musical emotion is a key construct for hearing-related work, because cochlear implant users and other listeners with degraded auditory resolution often perceive a compressed emotional range and rely on different acoustic cues than normal-hearing listeners.