Musical emotion is expressed in various adjectives such as cheerful, tender, majestic, etc. This implies that musical emotion is illustrated by a multi-dimensional space. Many psychologists examined how this space is constructed. They used the following methods typically: Listeners were presented various musical stimuli, and rated the emotional features using a set of semantic differential scales for each stimulus. Then the rated scores were analyzed using factor analysis or principal component analysis. Using the methods described above, researchers showed various numbers of dimensions, ranging from two to eight, to illustrate musical emotion. However, most of these studies concentrated on classical-style music. Only a few researchers have studied emotion in popular music. However, the set of the stimuli used in these studies consisted of a small number of pieces. In the present study, we conducted an experiment using 100 pieces of popular music. The set of the pieces reflected the current Japanese popular music scene. The set of the stimuli included Japanese popular pieces as well as American and European pieces. Four nonmusicians and two musicians listened to each of the pieces and rated the emotional features in it using 18 adjective scales. The results of the principal component analysis showed that the emotional space of the popular music is constructed by three dimensions; potency, activity, and evaluation. Moreover, the results of the analysis using multi-dimensional scaling showed that there were no significant differences between musicians and nonmusicians in their rating tendencies. The results also showed that the listeners wanted to listen to a “beautiful” tune with his/her lover, and an “active” tune with people around him/her.
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