HAI Seminar: Challenges & Opportunities For Human-Centered Music Emotion Recognition

Music plays a central role in human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation. In this HAI seminar, Postdoc Scholar Juan S. Gómez-Cañón, explored a human-centered approach to music emotion recognition (MER), arguing that emotional responses to music are shaped by individual experiences, cultural backgrounds, and contextual factors rather than by universal emotional signals. The presentation examined the challenges of modeling subjective emotional experiences, including inter-annotator disagreement, contextual dependence, and personalization, and discussed ethical concerns surrounding the use and potential misuse of emotion in a political context. This video was recorded at Stanford University on June 3, 2026. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:20 Presentation 00:44:53 Q&A