Let the Model Learn to Feel: Mode-Guided Tonality Injection for Symbolic Music Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Music emotion recognition is a key task in symbolic music understanding (SMER). Recent approaches have shown promising results by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., MIDIBERT, a benchmark in symbolic music understanding) to map musical semantics to emotional labels. While these models effectively capture distributional musical semantics, they often overlook tonal structures, particularly musical modes, which play a critical role in emotional perception according to music psychology. In this paper, we investigate the representational capacity of MIDIBERT and identify its limitations in capturing mode-emotion associations. To address this issue, we propose a Mode-Guided Enhancement (MoGE) strategy that incorporates psychological insights on mode into the model. Specifically, we first conduct a mode augmentation analysis, which reveals that MIDIBERT fails to effectively encode emotion-mode correlations. Motivated by this observation, we further identify the MIDIBERT layer that shows the weakest emotion relevance and introduce a Mode-guided Feature-wise linear modulation injection (MoFi) framework to inject explicit mode features, thereby enhancing the model