Moody music generator: Characterising control parameters using crowdsourcing

Marco Scirea, Mark J. Nelson, Julian Togelius

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    We characterise the expressive effects of a music generator capable of varying its moods through two control parameters. The two control parameters were constructed on the basis of existing work on valence and arousal in music, and intended to provide control over those two mood factors. In this paper we conduct a listener study to determine how people actually perceive the various moods the generator can produce. Rather than directly attempting to validate that our two control parameters represent arousal and valence, instead we conduct an open-ended study to crowd-source labels characterising different parts of this two-dimensional control space. Our aim is to characterise perception of the generator’s expressive space, without constraining listeners’ responses to labels specifically aimed at validating the original arousal/valence motivation. Subjects were asked to listen to clips of generated music over the Internet, and to describe the moods with free-text labels. We find that the arousal parameter does roughly map to perceived arousal, but that the nominal “valence” parameter has strong interaction with the arousal parameter, and produces different effects in different parts of the control space. We believe that the characterisation methodology described here is general and could be used to map the expressive range of other parameterisable generators.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationEvolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design - 4th International Conference, EvoMUSART 2015, Proceedings
    EditorsAdrian Carballal, João Correia, Colin Johnson
    PublisherSpringer Verlag
    Pages200-211
    Number of pages12
    ISBN (Electronic)9783319164977
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2015
    Event4th International Conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design, EvoMUSART 2015 - Copenhagen, Denmark
    Duration: Apr 8 2015Apr 10 2015

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume9027
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Other

    Other4th International Conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design, EvoMUSART 2015
    Country/TerritoryDenmark
    CityCopenhagen
    Period4/8/154/10/15

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Theoretical Computer Science
    • General Computer Science

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