The MERGE project seeks to advance Music Emotion Recognition research by following an explicitly bi-modal approach, which models lyrics and audio simultaneously, and defines the following scientific objectives: 1) Feature engineering/learning. To devise meaningful MER features (both handcrafted and via feature/deep learning) simultaneously in the audio and lyrics domains, following a bi-modal approach. 2) Robust public datasets. To collect and robustly annotate data for MER based on audio and lyrics, and release it to the MIR community. 3) Static MER and MEVD. To combine these contributions to advance both static MER and MEVD, addressing bimodal approaches and dimensional MER. As a technological objective, we will develop two MER software applications (a standalone and a web app) to demonstrate our scientific innovations.