Sectional Structure and Emotional Dynamics in Chinese Pop Songs: An Empirical Analysis of Valence-Arousal Trajectories across 100 Songs

📅 2026-09-14
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过分析100首中文流行歌曲的段落结构与情绪动态,特别是Valence-Arousal轨迹,揭示了不同段落间的情绪变化模式及整曲情绪累积趋势。
📝 Abstract
Music Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to identify and represent emotional information in music through computational methods and is an important research area within Music Information Retrieval (MIR). To address the limited consideration of song sectional structure in existing dynamic MER research, this study examines 100 Chinese pop songs by aligning 1,046 manually annotated sections with continuous Valence-Arousal (VA) trajectories and analyzing them from the perspectives of section type, adjacent section transitions, repeated sections, and whole-song trajectories. The results show that emotional differences across sections are reflected more strongly in Arousal. Verse typically forms a relatively low-activation baseline, Pre-chorus exhibits a progressive buildup, and Chorus produces a more pronounced high-arousal arrival, while Interlude, Bridge, and Outro tend to show transitional, divergent, and closing functions, respectively. Although whole-song sectional configurations are diverse, high-frequency local transitions are relatively concentrated. High-arousal positions occur more often in the later part of a song, but are not fixed to the final Chorus. Based on these findings, this study summarizes the emotional organization of the selected pop songs as an empirical framework of "local cycles-global accumulation", in which local sectional cycles are accompanied by emotional pullbacks, while the overall trajectory exhibits a later-stage rise in VA and a tendency for high-Arousal positions to occur later in the song.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Music Emotion Recognition
Sectional Structure
Valence-Arousal Trajectories
Chinese Pop Songs
Emotional Dynamics
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Sectional Structure
Valence-Arousal Trajectories
Local Cycles-Global Accumulation
Emotional Dynamics