Automatic Mood Classification of Indian Popular Music

Music has been an inherent part of human life when it comes to recreation; entertainment and much recently, even as a therapeutic medium. The way music is composed, played and listened to has witnessed an enormous transition from the age of magnetic tape recorders to the recent age of digital music players streaming music from the cloud. What has remained intact is the special relation that music shares with human emotions. We most often choose to listen to a song or music which best fits our mood at that instant. In spite of this strong correlation, most of the music softwares present today are still devoid of providing the facility of mood-aware play-list generation. This increases the time music listeners take in manually choosing a list of songs suiting a particular mood or occasion, which can be avoided by annotating songs with the relevant emotion category they convey. The problem, however, lies in the overhead of manual annotation of music with its corresponding mood and the challenge is to identify this aspect automatically and intelligently. The study of mood recognition in the field of music has gained a lot of momentum in the recent years with machine learning and data mining techniques contributing considerably to analyze and identify the relation of mood with music. We take the same inspiration forward and contribute by making an effort to build a system for automatic identification of mood underlying the audio songs by mining their spectral, temporal audio features. Our focus is specifically on Indian Popular Hindi songs. We have analyzed various data classification algorithms in order to learn, train and test the model representing the moods of these audio songs and developed an open source framework for the same. We have been successful to achieve a satisfactory precision of 70% to 75% in identifying the mood underlying the Indian popular music by introducing the bagging (ensemble) of random forest approach experimented over a list of 4600 audio clips.