Vector representation of emotion flow for popular music

The flow of emotion expressed by music through time is a useful feature for music information indexing and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel vector representation of emotion flow for popular music. It exploits the repetitive verse-chorus structure of popular music and connects a verse (represented by a point) and its corresponding chorus (another point) in the valence-arousal emotion plane. The proposed vector representation visually gives users a snapshot of the emotion flow of a popular song in an intuitive and instant manner, more effective than the point and curve representations of music emotion flow. Because many other genres also have repetitive music structure, the vector representation has a wide range of applications.