Lyrics, music, and emotions

In this paper, we explore the classification of emotions in songs, using the music and the lyrics representation of the songs. We introduce a novel corpus of music and lyrics, consisting of 100 songs annotated for emotions. We show that textual and musical features can both be successfully used for emotion recognition in songs. Moreover, through comparative experiments, we show that the joint use of lyrics and music brings significant improvements over each of the individual textual and musical classifiers, with error rate reductions of up to 31%.