Semantic models of musical mood: Comparison between crowd-sourced and curated editorial tags

Social media services such as Last.fm provide crowd-sourced mood tags which are a rich but often noisy source of information. In contrast, editorial annotations from production music libraries are meant to be incisive in nature. We compare the efficiency of these two data sources in capturing semantic information on mood expressed by music. First, a semantic computing technique devised for mood-related tags in large datasets is applied to Last.fm and I Like Music (ILM) corpora separately (250,000 tracks each). The resulting semantic estimates are then correlated with listener ratings of arousal, valence and tension. High correlations (Spearman´s rho) are found between the track positions in the dimensional mood spaces and listener ratings using both data sources (0.60 <; r_s <; 0.70). In addition, the use of curated editorial data provides a statistically significant improvement compared to crowd-sourced data for predicting moods perceived in music.