Music has invariant temporal forms that reliably communicate feelings, based on the context. A musical cadence versus none, a change in rhythm, lingering on a note... The common nature of these forms lends themselves to common feelings about them. When two people are open to music, with a similar experience, they roughly feel the same thing. Perhaps not exactly, but music as a technology for exchanging non-verbal experiences, feels, is surprisingly consistent — why does film music have such a common effect on the emotional vibe of the scene?

In the future, if we could gather and annotate people's feelings in response to musical forms (including but far more than consonance and dissonance), I'm sure this would enable an AI-based model of the emotional resonances of various musical elements (and their multi-level representations in the neural network). Then, compositional models could be trained using real-time aesthetic rating devices (e.g., reporting on pleasure/uncomfortabble and interestingness/boringness).

Now, this system would hypothetically be able to manipulate emotions, at least to the extent that a composer can now.

Is that useful in anything but a creepy way? Well, maybe you could add filters to existing compositions to change their vibe... like, the "humanize" button in logic pro gives a looser feel. You might be able to apply filters that could make a song feel more longing or hopeful.

#futureideas