A study coordinated by the Autonomous University of Barcelona has conducted research demonstrating that music generated by artificial intelligence can provoke a more intense emotional response than music composed by humans. The experiment, conducted with 88 people, showed that those who listened to music created by AI—especially music composed with complex instructions—experienced greater pupil dilation, more blinking, and more intense skin responses. In other words, greater emotional arousal.
What's truly disturbing isn't that a machine can imitate a symphony or that it can generate useful pieces for advertisements or video games. What marks a before and after is that it begins to do so with apparently superior emotional effectiveness. Because art isn't just a result. It's also a source. And if anything has characterized art, from its most remote origins, it's its human emotional roots. Music—like poetry, like painting—arises from authentic emotions: pain, love, loss, admiration. But artificial intelligence doesn't feel. It doesn't cry, it doesn't remember, it doesn't yearn. It only calculates. And what moves us in these new pieces aren't the machine's emotions, but statistical traces of human emotions stored in databases. We're hearing probabilities, not experiences. What's transformative—and at the same time disturbing—is that we will soon come to accept soulless music as the stimulus for our emotions.
This isn't about denying that AI can become a useful creative tool for music. But there's something essential we can't lose along the way: the right to know. Just as we distinguish between an original piece and a copy, or between a natural food and a synthetic one, we should have the right—as music listeners or consumers—to know whether what we hear has been created by a person or an automated model. Because music isn't just something you hear. It's a form of communication between two human beings through sounds. When we listen, we connect with another person's experience and emotion. This is what art is: a form of communication of feelings between human beings.
AI music is welcome, but it must come with an informative label. Then it's up to each individual to decide. In the near future, some will fall in love with their robot. But at least they'll know it's not a person. Well, that's it, but with music.
