Abstract

Music and emotion are two realms traditionally considered to be unique to human intelligence. This dissertation focuses on furthering artificial intelligence research, specifically in the area of computational creativity, by investigating methods of composing music that elicits desired emotional and physiological responses. It includes the following: an algorithm for generating original musical selections that effectively elicit targeted emotional and physiological responses; a description of some of the musical features that contribute to the conveyance of a given emotion or the elicitation of a given physiological response; and an account of how this algorithm can be used effectively in two different situations, the generation of soundtracks for fairy tales and the generation of melodic accompaniments for lyrics. This dissertation also presents research on more general machine learning topics. These include a method of combining output from base classifiers in an ensemble that improves accuracy over a number of different baseline strategies and a description of some of the problems inherent in the Bayesian model averaging strategy and a novel algorithm for improving it.

Degree

PhD

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/