The emotional impact of music or color can be maximized if they are used together. This article presents a mood-lighting system that automatically detects the mood of a piece of music and expresses the mood via synchronized lighting. To do this, the relationship between mood words and colors was analyzed via a web questionnaire (n=202) on moods associated with music and colors. Data analysis generated lighting scenarios reflecting changes in the mood of music. Each piece of music was divided into several segments using structural analysis, with the mood of each segment detected by the mood classification module using the neural network. A matching color was then assigned. The best performance of our mood classification module was <70%, which is not sufficient for commercial use; however, this figure is high enough to show the potential of this approach. (c) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 201-212, 2015