Moral Echoes: Do Humanness and Morality Affect Emotional and Aesthetic Responses to Music?

When listening to novel music, extramusical information about the musician may influence a listener’s evaluations of the music. Here, we studied the extent to which information about the musicians’ humanness and morality affected listeners’ emotional and aesthetic responses to their music. This online, pre-registered experiment followed a 2 (Humanness: Human vs. AI-model) × 2 (Vocalist Sex: Male vs. Female) × 3 (Morality: Moral, Immoral, Neutral) mixed factorial design. Participants (N = 400) were randomly assigned to one of four groups in which they read a total of three descriptions depicting a moral, immoral, and neutral behavior and listened to a total of three unfamiliar songs randomly paired with a description. Emotional and aesthetic responses to each song were measured using validated measures (GEMS-9 scale), along with additional items assessing feelings of being moved, connected, perceived beauty, perceived creativity, and liking. As predicted, linear mixed-effects models revealed significant main effects of morality for all dependent variables, with immoral descriptions consistently yielding more negative ratings. Contrary to what was predicted, no significant main effect of humanness (human vs. AI-model) was observed. Likewise, no significant interaction was observed between morality and humanness.