Moral echoes: do morality and humanness affect emotional and aesthetic responses to music?

When listening to novel music, extra-musical 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, Morality and Sex, conveyed by their vocal timbre and tessitura, 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, differing in Humanness and Vocalist Sex. Participants read three descriptions depicting a Moral, Immoral and Neutral behaviour and listened to three unfamiliar songs pseudorandomly 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, Liking and perceived Creativity. 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.