Two of our FCT project proposals submitted in March 2021 have been recomended for funding (1 PTDC + 1 EXPL). I will be the co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of the PTDC project.

Music Emotion Recognition - Next Generation

The first project, Music Emotion Recognition - Next Generation (PTDC/CCI-COM/3171/2021), will receive 192,083.47€ and fund (among other things) two PhD grants to apply deep learn in MER.

We aim to advance MER research by following an explicitly bi-modal approach which models lyrics and audio simultaneously, and define the following scientific objectives:
  1. Feature engineering/learning. To devise meaningful MER features (both handcrafted and via feature/deep learning) simultaneously in the audio and lyrics domains following a bi-modal approach.
  2. Robust public datasets. To collect and robustly annotate data for MER based on audio + lyrics and to release it to the MIR community.
  3. Static MER and MEVD. To combine these contributions to advance both static MER and MEVD, addressing bi-modal approaches and dimensional MER.

Playback the music of the brain - decoding emotions elicited by musical sounds in the human brain

The second project, Playback the music of the brain - decoding emotions elicited by musical sounds in the human brain (EXPL/PSI-GER/0948/2021), is exploratory and will receive 49,504.20€.

Our project aims to unravel the “cesura”, the unknown relation, between the classification of music excerpts regarding perceived emotions and the neural correlates associated, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ultimately, we aim to establish the connection between music descriptors and brain activity patterns. Our proposal is based on the idea that fMRI can be used to explore the neural representation of music and of its emotional content. Our hypothesis is that the emotion recognition neural network, which includes emotion-dependent frontal regions (orbitofrontal, ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal), supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and subcortical regions as the amygdala, hippocampus, and striatum, in coordination with the auditory cortex, contributes to the mapping of music features and evoked emotions.