Automatic Generation of Emotionally-Targeted Soundtracks

Music can be used both to direct and enhance the impact a story can have on its listeners. This work makes use of two creative systems to provide emotionally-targeted musical accompaniment for stories. One system assigns emotional labels to text, and the other generates original musical compositions with targeted emotional content. We use these two programs to generate music to accompany audio readings of fairy tales. Results show that music with targeted emotional content makes the stories significantly more enjoyable to listen to and increases listener perception of emotion in the text.