Album art often reflects the trends and themes of the songs in a given collection, and even the identities of the musicians who produced it. It therefore plays a central role in fomenting a potential listener’s first impression of the work. As such, musicians strive to find suitable images for this purpose, and those with limited financial resources or design skills may struggle to do so. Here, we report the development of Visualyre, a deep learning–based application that generates album art images from users’ song lyrics and audio files. This tool relies on generative adversarial network models to generate images from textual input (lyrics) and style transfer models to adjust the image according to the mood of the audio. We then report the results of a user study involving 35 amateur and independent musicians who tested the system. Results suggest that Visualyre was generally well received and largely effective in its intended purpose: providing musicians with a resource for generating their own album art.
Conventional writing therapies are versatile, accessible and easy to facilitate online, but often require participants to self-disclose traumatic experiences. To make expressive writing therapies safer for online, unsupervised environments, we explored the use of text-to-image generation as a means to downregulate negative emotions during a fictional writing exercise. We developed a writing tool, StoryWriter, that uses Generative Adversarial Network models to generate artwork from users’ narratives in real time. These images were intended to positively distract users from their negative emotions throughout the writing task. In this paper, we report the outcomes of two user studies: Study 1 (
N
= 388), which experimentally examined the efficacy of this application via negative versus neutral emotion induction and image generation versus no image generation control groups; and Study 2 (
N
= 54), which qualitatively examined open-ended feedback. Our results are heterogeneous: both studies suggested that StoryWriter somewhat contributed to improved emotion outcomes for participants with pre-existing negative emotions, but users’ open-ended responses indicated that these outcomes may be adversely modulated by the generated images, which could undermine the therapeutic benefits of the writing task itself.
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