The relationship between music and emotion constitutes a central axis in music therapy, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience, particularly within the framework of interventions applied in educational and therapeutic settings. Traditionally, the classification of musical excerpts as activating or relaxing has been based on structural parameters derived from the European repertoire of the common practice period, and these criteria have been generalized to different cultural contexts without local validation. The present study aimed to develop and validate a database of culturally contextualized Latin American pieces and to analyze whether musical structural categories predict the valence and level of activation perceived by Argentine listeners. Twenty-two Latin American pieces were selected through expert consensus and were evaluated by 252 participants from Argentina, who rated emotional valence and level of activation after listening to each excerpt. In parallel, all pieces were systematically analyzed according to structural musical parameters (tempo, mode, timbre, intensity, polyphonic density, formal variation, and expectancy violation). Emotional responses were compared with those obtained for European classical pieces commonly used in the literature. The results confirmed significant differences between activating and relaxing categories in valence and activation, but not according to the cultural origin of the pieces. Furthermore, certain parameters, such as mode and tempo, did not strictly conform to traditional theoretical assumptions. These findings underscore the need for culturally sensitive and multidimensional methodological approaches in the applied study of musical emotion.
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