Portraying Emotion in Generative Art

I was impressed with a thesis paper this week that is titled,

portraying emotion in generative music composition 

written by Alison Mattek. I was reminded of my definition of art having to do with conveying the emotion of the artist, and this topic name threw me off. I do believe that computers could generate art, but I had never thought about this idea that they can actually portray emotion through that art. Do computers and programs feel anything? Is the computer portraying the emotion of the program creator? Is the generative piece simply modeling the emotion that would be felt if the piece had been written by a specific person? So many questions.

The paper is really very interesting though and it goes on to talk about algorithms that have been created in order to create the same type of emotion that would be felt if the piece had been created by a human. This is done by tweaking and programming different elements of the piece. As the paper states, "Recent research in music perception has correlated the quality of specific musical features (e.g. harmony, tempo, timbre) with certain emotional reactions in the listener." These musical features can then be changed around to evoke the desired emotion, and this process can be taught to computers.

If generative pieces really can evoke and display emotion, then one would argue that computers definitely can make art.