Between the AI and Me: Analysing Listeners' Perspectives on AI- and Human-Composed Progressive Metal Music
This work addresses how AI-generated music is perceived by fans in an under-explored genre, with incremental implications for music information retrieval and ethical data diversity.
The study investigated listeners' ability to distinguish between AI- and human-composed progressive metal music, finding that while AI-generated excerpts sometimes matched human ratings, listeners preferred human compositions and could differentiate AI-generated rock from progressive metal.
Generative AI models have recently blossomed, significantly impacting artistic and musical traditions. Research investigating how humans interact with and deem these models is therefore crucial. Through a listening and reflection study, we explore participants' perspectives on AI- vs human-generated progressive metal, in symbolic format, using rock music as a control group. AI-generated examples were produced by ProgGP, a Transformer-based model. We propose a mixed methods approach to assess the effects of generation type (human vs. AI), genre (progressive metal vs. rock), and curation process (random vs. cherry-picked). This combines quantitative feedback on genre congruence, preference, creativity, consistency, playability, humanness, and repeatability, and qualitative feedback to provide insights into listeners' experiences. A total of 32 progressive metal fans completed the study. Our findings validate the use of fine-tuning to achieve genre-specific specialization in AI music generation, as listeners could distinguish between AI-generated rock and progressive metal. Despite some AI-generated excerpts receiving similar ratings to human music, listeners exhibited a preference for human compositions. Thematic analysis identified key features for genre and AI vs. human distinctions. Finally, we consider the ethical implications of our work in promoting musical data diversity within MIR research by focusing on an under-explored genre.