HAI & SDS Seminar with Juan Sebastian Gomez Cannon

Challenges and Opportunities for Human-Centered Music Emotion Recognition

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Music is intertwined with human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation. This has motivated decades of research in music emotion recognition (MER), aiming to model emotional responses to music using computational methods. However, emotional responses to music are not fixed properties of the signal but emerge from interactions between musical structure, listener background, cultural context, and situational factors. As a result, traditional MER approaches that rely on averaged labels or universal ground truth struggle to capture the diversity and subjectivity of emotional experiences.

This talk argues for a human-centered perspective on MER that treats subjectivity not as noise but as a core signal. I discuss methodological challenges in constructing meaningful ground truth, including inter-annotator disagreement, contextual dependence, and personalization, as well as ethical concerns related to the use of emotion in a political context, and potential misuse.

Details:

Time: 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm PT

Location: Gates Computer Science Building, Room 119, 353 Jane Stanford Way, CA 94503.

Advance registration is required to guarantee entry.

We are happy to accommodate walk-in guests as space allows. Please note that if the seminar is sold out, we may not be able to admit those without prior registration.

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Host or Publisher Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)