A Dimensional Study on the Emotion of Musical Pieces Composed for Video Games
Masanari Tsukamoto, Masashi Yamada, Ryo Yoneda · 2010
In recent years, the hardware and software of video games has been developing incredibly, and it is strongly needed to establish a scientific logic to efficiently design music for video games. As the first step for constructing the scientific design of game music, the emotion of game music was investigated. In the present study, we conducted an experiment using 100 pieces of game music. Seven listeners listened to each of the pieces and rated the emotional features in it using 29 adjective scales. The scores were averaged over listeners and used in principal component analysis. The results showed that the two-dimensional space accounts for 78 % of data variance. The two dimensions were labelled “pleasantness” and “excitability”, respectively, from the scales having high loadings on the dimensions. The pleasantness and excitability corresponds well to the two dimensions of valence and activity which illustrates classical music. The results show that the dimensional structure of the emotion of game music is consistent to that of classical music.