I am a musician and coder who makes music for video games.
The first thing I usually do when composing a new piece of music for a game or video that already has its
own mood is to find the exact right word that describes the mood and write it down.
That way I can stay focused on the right feel without drifting into something that subtlely off.
(
You can judge for yourself how well this works in my portfolio.)
I have been going to AllMusic's wonderful
mood page and choosing from the list there.
But it got kind of tedious rummaging through a list of 200ish words in alphabetical order, which for this use is unintuitive and slow going.
I figured if I could make an emotion wheel out of the moods it would be a lot quicker to find the right one.
Fortunately AllMusic lists 'related moods' at the bottom of each mood page, which (when combined with a
D3 force directed graph) gives you a visual much like what you see here.
However I felt it still needed coloration to give a sense of place in the graph.
That way it would be very clear when you are getting towards the edge of the 'happy' moods and into something else.
This meant assigning each mood to a basic emotion by hand. Which can be very hard in some cases, and I'm still not convinced I made the right call on some of them. What emotion is 'sophisticated'?
I kept adjusting the emotion grouping until the results made sense, and now I'm pretty happy with the result.