Modeling Perceptions of Valence in Diverse Music: Roles of Acoustic Features, Agency and Individual Variation

We investigate the roles of the acoustic parameters intensity and spectral flatness in the modeling of continuously measured perceptions of affect in nine diverse musical extracts. The extract sources range from Australian Aboriginal and Balinese music, to classical music from Mozart to minimalism and Xenakis; and include jazz, ambient, drum n' bass and performance text. We particularly assess whether modeling perceptions of the valence expressed by the music, generally modeled less well than the affective dimension of arousal, can be enhanced by inclusion of perceptions of change in the sound, human agency, musical segmentation, and random effects across participants, as model components. We confirm each of these expectations, and provide indications that perceived change in the music may eventually be subsumed adequately under its components such as acoustic features and agency. We find that participants vary substantially in the predictors useful for modeling their responses (judged by the random effects components of mixed effects cross-sectional time series analyses). But we also find that pieces do too, while yet sharing sufficient features that a single common model of the responses to all nine pieces has competitive precision.