Sensory valuation is a fundamental aspect of cognition. It involves assigning hedonic value to a stimulus based on its sensory information considering personal and contextual factors. Hedonic values (e.g., liking) can be deemed affective states that motivate behavior, but the relations between hedonic and affective judgments have yet to be established. To fill this gap, we investigated the relations between stimulus features, perceived affect, and liking across domains and with potentially relevant individual traits. Fifty-eight participants untrained in music and visual art rated their liking and perceived valence and arousal for visual designs and short melodies varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity and filled out several questionnaires. First, we examined group-level relations between perceived affect and liking across domains. Second, we inspected the relations between the individual use of musical and visual properties in judgments of liking and perceived affect-that is, between aesthetic and perceived-affect sensitivities. Third, we inquired into the influence of information-related (need for cognition, or NFC) and affect-related (need for emotion) traits on individual sensitivities. We found domain-specific effects of the stimulus features on liking, a linear association between valence and liking, the inverted-U model of arousal and liking, a binary profile of musical aesthetic sensitivities, and a modulatory effect of NFC on how people use stimulus properties in their hedonic and affective judgments. In summary, the results suggest that hedonic value is primarily computed from domain-specific sensory information partially moderated by NFC.

Musical worlds, not unlike our lived realities, are fundamentally fragmented and diverse, a fact often seen as a challenge or even a threat to the validity of research in Music Information Research (MIR). In this article, we propose to treat this characteristic of our musical universe(s) as an opportunity to fundamentally enrich and re-orient MIR. We propose that the time has arrived for MIR to reflect on its ethical and cultural turns (if they have been initiated at all) and take them a step further, with the goal of profoundly diversifying the discipline beyond the diversification of datasets. Such diversification, we argue, is likely to remain superficial if it is not accompanied by a simultaneous auto-critique of the discipline's raison d'être. Indeed, this move to diversify touches on the philosophical underpinnings of what MIR is and should become as a field of research: What is music (ontology)? What are the nature and limits of knowledge concerning music (epistemology)? How do we obtain such knowledge (methodology)? And what about music and our own research endeavor do we consider "good" and "valuable" (axiology)? This path involves sincere inter-and intra-disciplinary struggles that underlie MIR, and we point to "agonistic interdisciplinarity" -that we have practiced ourselves via the writing of this article -as a future worth reaching for. The two featured case studies, about possible philosophical re-orientations in approaching ethics of music AI and about responsible engineering when AI meets traditional music, indicate a glimpse of what is possible.