Users of electronic audio and video playback devices have become familiar with listening and viewing media from stored memory. Music may be listened to and any art may be viewed including television, motion pictures, still images and any other copyrightable works of audible or visual art, the types of which are vast. Traditional indexing criteria for such stored memory may include artist or author identification, track or work of art title, genre, era or origin, style of art, and other criteria pertaining to the work itself. According to the present invention, media elements stored in memory may now be characterized by entering criteria based on the qualitative attributes and emotive features ascertained upon playback or subsequent evaluation which are then associated with each stored audio, video, image or other file, for subsequent indexing, searching and recommendation operations.