Characterization of movie genre based on music score

While it is clear that the full emotional effect of a movie scene is carried through the successful interpretation of audio and visual information, music still carries a significant impact for interpretation of the director's intent and style. The intent of this study was to provide a preliminary understanding on a new database for the impact of timbral and select rhythm features in characterizing the differences among movie genres based on their film scores. For this study, a database of film scores from 98 movies was collected containing instrumental (non-vocal) music from 25 romance, 25 drama, 23 horror, and 25 action movies. Both pair-wise genre classification and classification with all four genres was performed using support vector machines (SVM) in a ten-fold cross-validation test. The results of the study support the notion that high intensity movies (i.e., Action and Horror) have musical cues that are measurably different from the musical scores for movies with more measured expressions of emotion (i.e., Drama and Romance).