MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres
van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods, 57(7), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0
MUSIFEAST-17 is an open, normed music stimulus set comprising 356 instrumental 30-second clips drawn from commercially released music across 17 genres: 60s, 80s, Ambient, Classical, Country, Dance, Electronic, Film, Folk, Funk, Hip-hop, Jazz, Metal, Pop, R&B, Rock, and Video game.
The set was designed to maximise ecological validity for UK and US listeners and to reflect the genuine diversity of everyday Western musical experience — spanning art music, popular music, and music composed for media. Stimuli are available to select both independently (e.g. targeting a specific valence–arousal quadrant) and in combination across dimensions.
Normative data were collected from 701 UK and US participants sampled evenly across adulthood (ages 18–75), and include ratings of:
- Familiarity
- Enjoyment
- Emotional expression (valence, arousal)
- Perceived contrast
- Genre recognition
- Thought types evoked during listening
- Contextual associations
An interactive Shiny app lets you explore the stimulus set visually — plot any two normative dimensions against each other, filter by genre, and click any point to play the associated audio clip directly in your browser.
Built with Shinylive + webR — runs entirely in the browser, no server required. First load takes 30–90 seconds while the R environment initialises.
MUSIFEAST-17/
├── app.R # Shiny app source
├── data/
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_all.csv # Full normative data (all participants)
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_UK18to30.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_UK31to45.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_UK46to60.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_UK61to75.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_US18to30.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_US31to45.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_US46to60.csv
│ ├── MUSIFEAST17_US61to75.csv
│ ├── M17_raw_data_cleaned.csv
│ ├── Raw_data_description.pdf
│ └── README_M17_description.pdf
├── stimuli/
│ ├── _MUSIFEAST17_metadata.csv
│ ├── _stimulus_collection_method.pdf
│ └── [356 × genre_arousal_XX.mp3]
└── docs/
└── app/ # Shinylive deployment (GitHub Pages)
All normative data tables are available in data/. The primary file is MUSIFEAST17_all.csv, which contains the full dataset across all participants. Age- and region-stratified subsets (UK/US × 18–30 / 31–45 / 46–60 / 61–75) are provided separately for analyses targeting specific listener groups.
The full dataset is also archived on OSF: https://osf.io/5ebz2
Normative columns follow the convention DIMENSION_M (mean) and DIMENSION_SD (standard deviation). For example: valence_M, arousal_M, familiarity_M, enjoyment_M. See data/Raw_data_description.pdf for full variable descriptions.
All 356 audio clips (30-second instrumental excerpts, .mp3) are in stimuli/. Files are named by collection-stage genre and familiarity category: GENRE_FAMILIARITY_XX.mp3 (e.g. Jazz_HIGH_03.mp3). Metadata including track titles, artists, and genre assignments are in stimuli/_MUSIFEAST17_metadata.csv.
Stimulus selection methodology is described in stimuli/_stimulus_collection_method.pdf and in the paper below.
Audio features for MUSIFEAST-17 were independently extracted by Tuomas Eerola using MIR Toolbox. Both a full feature set and a reduced 33-feature set are available:
- GitHub: tuomaseerola/MUSIFEAST17-audio
- Visualised report: tuomaseerola.github.io/MUSIFEAST17-audio
Stimulus set paper
van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025). MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods, 57(7), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0
Thought types paper
van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025). Thoughtscapes in music: An examination of thought types occurring during music listening across 17 genres. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251346654
Music stimuli are used under fair dealing / fair use for non-commercial academic research. Normative data and all other materials in this repository are released under CC0 1.0 (public domain) unless otherwise noted — see LICENSE.
If you use MUSIFEAST-17 in your research, please cite:
van der Walle, H. A., Wu, W., Margulis, E. H., & Jakubowski, K. (2025).
MUSIFEAST-17: MUsic Stimuli for Imagination, Familiarity, Emotion, and
Aesthetic STudies across 17 genres. Behavior Research Methods, 57(7), 1–26.
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02724-0
Hazel Aileen van der Walle · Durham University, Music Department hazel.a.van-der-walle@durham.ac.uk · ORCID 0009-0003-1029-9683 · github.com/HazelvdW