Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network

Music emotion recognition (MER) seeks to understand the complex emotional landscapes elicited by music, acknowledging music’s profound social and psychological roles beyond traditional tasks such as genre classification or content similarity. MER relies heavily on high‑quality emotional annotations,...

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Main Authors: Andreas Peintner, Marta Moscati, Yu Kinoshita, Richard Vogl, Peter Knees, Markus Schedl, Hannah Strauss, Marcel Zentner, Eva Zangerle
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Ubiquity Press 2025-06-01
Series:Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
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Online Access:https://account.transactions.ismir.net/index.php/up-j-tismir/article/view/235
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author Andreas Peintner
Marta Moscati
Yu Kinoshita
Richard Vogl
Peter Knees
Markus Schedl
Hannah Strauss
Marcel Zentner
Eva Zangerle
author_facet Andreas Peintner
Marta Moscati
Yu Kinoshita
Richard Vogl
Peter Knees
Markus Schedl
Hannah Strauss
Marcel Zentner
Eva Zangerle
author_sort Andreas Peintner
collection DOAJ
description Music emotion recognition (MER) seeks to understand the complex emotional landscapes elicited by music, acknowledging music’s profound social and psychological roles beyond traditional tasks such as genre classification or content similarity. MER relies heavily on high‑quality emotional annotations, which serve as the foundation for training models to recognize emotions. However, collecting these annotations is both complex and costly, leading to limited availability of large‑scale datasets for MER. Recent efforts in MER for automatically extracting emotion have focused on learning track representations in a supervised manner. However, these approaches mainly use simplified emotion models due to limited datasets or a lack of necessity for sophisticated emotion models and ignore hidden inter‑track relations, which are beneficial in a semi‑supervised learning setting. This paper proposes a novel approach to MER by constructing a multi‑relational graph that encapsulates different facets of music. We leverage graph neural networks to model intricate inter‑track relationships and capture structurally induced representations from user data, such as listening histories, genres, and tags. Our model, the semi‑supervised multi‑relational graph neural network for emotion recognition (SRGNN‑Emo), innovates by combining graph‑based modeling with semi‑supervised learning, using rich user data to extract nuanced emotional profiles from music tracks. Through extensive experimentation, SRGNN‑Emo demonstrates significant improvements in R2 and root mean squared error metrics for predicting the intensity of nine continuous emotions (Geneva Emotional Music Scale), demonstrating its superior capability in capturing and predicting complex emotional expressions in music.
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spelling doaj-art-a2174c70959c491f910284cb1b4b2d932025-08-20T03:12:54ZengUbiquity PressTransactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval2514-32982025-06-0181140–153140–15310.5334/tismir.235235Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural NetworkAndreas Peintner0https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7337-524XMarta Moscati1https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5541-4919Yu Kinoshita2Richard Vogl3https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2488-0084Peter Knees4https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3906-1292Markus Schedl5https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1706-3406Hannah Strauss6https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6235-4010Marcel Zentner7https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8580-8030Eva Zangerle8https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3195-8273University of Innsbruck, InnsbruckJohannes Kepler University Linz, LinzTU Wien, WienTU Wien, WienTU Wien, WienJohannes Kepler University Linz, LinzUniversity of Innsbruck, InnsbruckUniversity of Innsbruck, InnsbruckUniversity of Innsbruck, InnsbruckMusic emotion recognition (MER) seeks to understand the complex emotional landscapes elicited by music, acknowledging music’s profound social and psychological roles beyond traditional tasks such as genre classification or content similarity. MER relies heavily on high‑quality emotional annotations, which serve as the foundation for training models to recognize emotions. However, collecting these annotations is both complex and costly, leading to limited availability of large‑scale datasets for MER. Recent efforts in MER for automatically extracting emotion have focused on learning track representations in a supervised manner. However, these approaches mainly use simplified emotion models due to limited datasets or a lack of necessity for sophisticated emotion models and ignore hidden inter‑track relations, which are beneficial in a semi‑supervised learning setting. This paper proposes a novel approach to MER by constructing a multi‑relational graph that encapsulates different facets of music. We leverage graph neural networks to model intricate inter‑track relationships and capture structurally induced representations from user data, such as listening histories, genres, and tags. Our model, the semi‑supervised multi‑relational graph neural network for emotion recognition (SRGNN‑Emo), innovates by combining graph‑based modeling with semi‑supervised learning, using rich user data to extract nuanced emotional profiles from music tracks. Through extensive experimentation, SRGNN‑Emo demonstrates significant improvements in R2 and root mean squared error metrics for predicting the intensity of nine continuous emotions (Geneva Emotional Music Scale), demonstrating its superior capability in capturing and predicting complex emotional expressions in music.https://account.transactions.ismir.net/index.php/up-j-tismir/article/view/235music emotion recognitiongraph neural networkssemi-supervised learningcontrastive lossevoked emotionsnode representationmulti-relationalgenrestags
spellingShingle Andreas Peintner
Marta Moscati
Yu Kinoshita
Richard Vogl
Peter Knees
Markus Schedl
Hannah Strauss
Marcel Zentner
Eva Zangerle
Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
music emotion recognition
graph neural networks
semi-supervised learning
contrastive loss
evoked emotions
node representation
multi-relational
genres
tags
title Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
title_full Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
title_fullStr Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
title_full_unstemmed Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
title_short Nuanced Music Emotion Recognition via a Semi‑Supervised Multi‑Relational Graph Neural Network
title_sort nuanced music emotion recognition via a semi supervised multi relational graph neural network
topic music emotion recognition
graph neural networks
semi-supervised learning
contrastive loss
evoked emotions
node representation
multi-relational
genres
tags
url https://account.transactions.ismir.net/index.php/up-j-tismir/article/view/235
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