To measure the perceived emotions caused by musical audio signals we propose to use “Free Choice Profiling” (FCP) combined with “Natural Grouping” (NG). FCP/NG – originally derived from food research and new to the research of music perception – allow participants to evaluate stimuli using own vocabulary. To evaluate the proposed methods, we conducted an experiment in which 16 participants had to assess major-major and minor-minor chord pairs. Unlike one could expect, allowing participants to express their perception freely does not lead to a degeneration of the quality of the data. Instead, clearly interpretable results consistent with music theory and emotional psychology were obtained. These results encourage further investigations, which could lead to a general method for assessing emotions in music.
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