Study finds AI-generated music 'inferior' to human-composed works

Researchers at the University of York have found that current AI-generated music is inferior to human-composed music. In the study, 50 participants with a high level of musical knowledge were played excerpts of music--some from real human-composed works, and others generated by deep learning (DL), a type of artificial neural network, and non-DL algorithms. The study recruited participants who had experience in analyzing note content and stylistic success in music so that results were not just focused on expression in music. The listeners were asked to rate the excerpts along six musical criteria (stylistic success, aesthetic pleasure, repetition or self-reference, melody, harmony, and rhythm), but were not told the identity--human-composed or computer-generated--of what they were hearing. Co-author Dr. Tom Collins, from the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York, said, "On analysis, the ratings for human-composed excerpts are significantly higher and stylistically more successful than those for any of the systems responsible for computer-generated excerpts."