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, as well their sex, affected listeners’ emotional and aesthetic responses to their music. This online, pre-registered experiment followed a 2 (Humanness: Human or AI-model) × 2 (Vocalist Sex: Male or Female) × 3 (Morality: Moral, Immoral, Neutral) mixed factorial design. Participants (N = 400) were randomly assigned to one of four groups, differing in Humanness and Vocalist sex. Participants read a total of three descriptions depicting a moral, immoral, and neutral behavior and listened to a total of three unfamiliar songs pseudo-randomly paired with a description. Emotional and aesthetic responses to each song were measured using validated measures (GEMS-9 scale), and 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 predictions, we observed no differences in responses to songs based on Humanness, no significant interaction between Morality and Humanness, and no effect of Vocalist Sex on responses.