Framing through music: a pilot study

We present a system that automatically generates music from visual art based on the perceived emotion of the given input. We propose the generated music as a framing device that can enhance the aesthetic experience of people viewing Computational Creativity (CC) outputs. In this paper, we carry out a first study to test this by comparing the aesthetic experience of viewing paintings generated by CC systems accompanied by either textual framing, our proposed musical framing or both. We evaluate our system by means of qualitative user evaluations, which require participants to rank their aesthetic experience from best to worst. The results from the study demonstrated that the musical framing generated by our system provided a better aesthetic experience for users compared to the textual framing. Furthermore, the results suggest that with more work, a combination of textual and musical framing could be used to further improve the aesthetic experience for people viewing visual CC art.