The bias of knowing: Emotional response to computer generated music

Keywords
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Issue Date
2016-07-19
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis aims to detect effect of composer information when listening to music. In particular, I researched whether a listener has a different emotional response to a melody when informed the melody was generated by a computer, as when informed it was composed by a human. If a bias exists, it may have an effect on the mutual –nonverbal- understanding of emotions between humans and computers, which is key to a natural interaction since our perception of computerised emotions may be different from human emotions. Two groups of participants listened to identical melodies: one group was told that they were going to rate emotion of computer generated music and the other group was told that they were going to rate that of human composed music. Given this information, I expected the ‘human composed’ group would have a stronger emotional response. This result did not show since –possibly- the given prime –human or computer music- was not strong enough to trigger a biased opinion in the participants. Participants agreed that happy songs correlate with a high energy and sad songs with low energy in the melody. It was found that these effects are caused by a combination of pitch change and variability of note length/tempo.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen