Exploring Variational Auto-encoder Architectures, Configurations, and Datasets for Generative Music Explainable AI

Generative AI models for music and the arts in general are increasingly complex and hard to understand.The field of ex-plainable AI(XAI)seeks to make complex and opaque AI models such as neural networks more understandable to people.One ap-proach to making generative AI models more understandable is to impose a small number of semantically meaningful attributes on gen-erative AI models.This paper contributes a systematic examination of the impact that different combinations of variational auto-en-coder models(measureVAE and adversarialVAE),configurations of latent space in the AI model(from 4 to 256 latent dimensions),and training datasets(Irish folk,Turkish folk,classical,and pop)have on music generation performance when 2 or 4 meaningful musical at-tributes are imposed on the generative model.To date,there have been no systematic comparisons of such models at this level of com-binatorial detail.Our findings show that measureVAE has better reconstruction performance than adversarialVAE which has better musical attribute independence.Results demonstrate that measureVAE was able to generate music across music genres with inter-pretable musical dimensions of control,and performs best with low complexity music such as pop and rock.We recommend that a 32 or 64 latent dimensional space is optimal for 4 regularised dimensions when using measureVAE to generate music across genres.Our res-ults are the first detailed comparisons of configurations of state-of-the-art generative AI models for music and can be used to help select and configure AI models,musical features,and datasets for more understandable generation of music.

The impact of consistency between the emotional feature of advertising music and brand personality on brand experience

Music in advertising plays a crucial role in making the audience feel beyond the multi-level visual experience.The intrinsic link between brand publicity and advertising music has long been a puzzle.This paper discusses the impact of the consistency between the emotional characteristics of music and brand personality on brand experience and expands the discussion to brand experience under market competition.We use the examples of Canon and Apple for our study.The results shows that:(1)the higher the degree of consistency between the emotional experience from music and brand personality,the greater the positive effect on brand experience;(2)this positive effect is not as significant for functional brands as it is for representative brands;(3)the consistency between the emotional experience from music and brand personality has a greater impact on brand experience for representative brands than functional brands.The results provide practical guidance for branding campaigns.