Effects of Added Vocals and Human Production to AI-composed Music on Listener’s Appreciation

Abstract

We investigated the extent to which listeners’ appreciation for AI composed music would change with the addition of vocals and human production. By combining a variety of commercially available and ad-hoc created software, we created four songs entirely composed by forms of machine intelligence. We then created 4 different conditions: with vs. without vocals (with lyrics generated by an AI), and human vs. AI production. We performed an experimental study with 40 participants and found that the added vocals did not improve listeners’ appreciation. Human-produced songs were also not better appreciated than AI-produced ones. By analyzing participants’ comments, we discuss possible reasons behind these results.

Keywords: AI-music; music perception; listener appreciation; vocals