AI system reads novels, then writes music for them

music and books
Credit: Brett Jordan

What would “Alice in Wonderland” sound like if it were set to music? And what if the composer were a computer?


First, the system reads the text of a work such as “Peter Pan.” Based on word scans, it assigns “densities” of two different states, positive or negative, and eight different emotions—joy, sadness, anger, disgust, anticipation, surprise, trust and fear.


The “emotion density data,” as the researchers describe it, is used to determine the tempo, key, notes, octaves and other musical variables. Shorter notes, for instance, correspond with more emotionally dense areas of the narrative.

So what does literature-inspired AI music sound like?

“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” the detective classic by Arthur Conan Doyle, was assigned “trust” as its highest emotion, followed by “fear.”

It’s a simple, pretty but fairly bland piano composition in C major with a few trills that might evoke Mozart. But listeners expecting a hint of Holmes’ criminal adversaries will be disappointed.

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is rendered as a brooding progression in C minor with “fear” and “sadness” as its themes. It may capture the atmosphere of the narrator’s journey into colonial Africa, but it’s not exactly a moving work.

“The current version of TransProse is just the beginning of our investigation and we don’t claim to be making beautiful music at this point,” Hannah Davis of New York University wrote in an email.




“There are many creative ways in which going from text to music and from music to text can be used,” Mohammad wrote in an email.


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