The 2007 mirex audio mood classification task: Lessons learned

Recent music information retrieval (MIR) research pays increasing attention to music classification based on moods expressed by music pieces. The first Audio Mood Classification (AMC) evaluation task was held in the 2007 running of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). This paper describes important issues in setting up the task, including dataset construction and ground-truth labeling, and analyzes human assessments on the audio dataset, as well as system performances from various angles. Interesting findings include system performance differences with regard to mood clusters and the levels of agreement amongst human judgments regarding mood labeling. Based on these analyses, we summarize experiences learned from the first community scale evaluation of the AMC task and propose recommendations for future AMC and similar evaluation tasks.