Deezer's AI can classify songs by mood and intensity

Human ears have no trouble sussing out the sentiment of songs -- say, the melancholia in Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven," or the passion in Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." In an attempt to get the latter to perform a bit more like the former, researchers at Deezer developed an artificially intelligent system that can associate certain tracks with moods. They describe their work in a new paper ("Music Mood Detection Based on Audio Lyrics With Deep Neural Nets") published on the preprint server Arxiv.org. "[A]utomatic music mood detection has been an active field of research … for the past twenty years," they wrote. "It consists of automatically determining the emotion felt when listening to a track. In this work, we focus on the task of multimodal mood detection based on the audio signal and the lyrics of the track."