An Analysis of Agreement in Classical Music Perception and Its Relationship to Listener Characteristics

We present a study, carried out on 241 participants, which investigates on classical music material the agreement of listeners on perceptual music aspects (related to emotion, tempo, complexity, and instrumentation) and the relation- ship between listener characteristics and these aspects. For the currently popular task of music emotion recognition, the former question is particularly important when defin- ing a ground truth of emotions perceived in a given music collection. We characterize listeners via a range of factors, including demographics, musical inclination, experience, and education, and personality traits. Participants rate the music material under investigation, i.e., 15 expert-defined segments of Beethoven’s 3 rd symphony, “Eroica”, in terms of 10 emotions, perceived tempo, complexity, and num- ber of instrument groups. Our study indicates only slight agreement on most perceptual aspects, but significant cor- relations between several listener characteristics and per- ceptual qualities.