Affective algorithmic composition of music: A systematic review

Abstract

Affective music composition systems are known to trigger emotions in humans. However, the design of such systems to stimulate users' emotions continues to be a challenge because, studies that aggregate existing literature in the domain to help advance research and knowledge is limited. This study presents a systematic literature review on affective algorithmic composition systems. Eighteen primary studies were selected from IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar databases following a systematic review protocol. The findings revealed that there is a lack of a unique definition that encapsulates the various types of affective algorithmic composition systems. Accordingly, a unique definition is provided. The findings also show that most affective algorithmic composition systems are designed for games to provide background music. The generative composition method was the most used compositional approach. Overall, there was rather a low amount of research in the domain. Possible reasons for these trends are the lack of a common definition for affective music composition systems and also the lack of detailed documentation of the design, implementation and evaluation of the existing systems.