Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón | Challenges And Opportunities For Human-Centered Music Emotion Recognition
Music is intertwined with human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation.
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Music is intertwined with human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation.
Strategic stability exists when neither side thinks it can improve its strategic outcome by striking first.

Strategic stability exists when neither side thinks it can improve its strategic outcome by striking first.
The 2026 RAISE Health Symposium will convene leading voices in technology, medicine, and policy to explore what’s real, what’s next, and what’s needed to ensure AI advances responsibly and benefits all. Registration opens March 11.

The 2026 RAISE Health Symposium will convene leading voices in technology, medicine, and policy to explore what’s real, what’s next, and what’s needed to ensure AI advances responsibly and benefits all. Registration opens March 11.
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.