Words to Music Synthesis

This paper discusses the design of a musical synthesizer that takes words as input, and attempts to generate music that somehow underscores those words. This is considered as a tool for sound designers who could, for example, enter dialogue from a film script and generate appropriate back- ground music. The synthesizer uses emotional valence and arousal as a common representation between words and mu- sic. It draws on previous studies that relate words and mu- sical features to valence and arousal. The synthesizer was evaluated with a user study. Participants listened to music generated by the synthesizer, and described the music with words. The arousal of the words they entered was highly correlated with the intended arousal of the music. The same was, surprisingly, not true for valence. The synthesizer is online, at [redacted URL].