Music appreciation class is to appreciate and evaluate musical works through listening, experiencing, exploring and evaluating, so as to cultivate students’ aesthetic perception ability and music cultural literacy. This paper examines the relationship between music emotion and music elements, selects traditional music elements that have a significant impact on people’s perception of music emotion for labeling, and creates a data set. Then, based on the emotional characteristics of music elements, the role mechanism of traditional music elements in music art appreciation was explored. Based on the coupling model, we also explored the law of time evolution of the coupling system of “traditional elements-music empathy level.” Traditional music elements have a significant positive correlation (P=0.0021) with students’ empathy in music appreciation, as demonstrated in the results. The results show that students’ music appreciation ability can be significantly enhanced through the synergy of excellent traditional Chinese music elements in music and art appreciation, which can help them to establish a correct worldview, outlook on life, and values.