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You might not think that an AI capable of making music would stimulate your emotion, but others think differently, particularly those who gathered at Mexico City's Symphony Hall in 2019 for Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, which I finished using melodies generated by an AI.

As the orchestra（管弦乐团） finished Schubert's original work and began the music the AI and I had written, I could feel the crowd's energy shift from astonishment to indignation and fear. They seemed afraid that an AI might be able to make emotional symphonic music. You can see their point: an AI that makes emotional music could affect the emotional lives of thousands or even millions of people in a small, but profound way, just like a human musician does.

Positive and negative, people reacted very strongly to AI's symphonic debut（首秀）. Even though most people don't believe that AI can create something enjoyable, they, at least partly, did enjoy the Unfinished Symphony.

Enjoyment in music implies that there's something in the music that the listener connects to, a perception of shared emotion. But, in the case of AI music, an emotion shared with who? AI, as of yet, has no emotions. So what is the meaning of music made without an emotional composer? The unsatisfying answer is that music has no objective meaning. A composer can decide how a piece of music sounds, but it's the listener that decides what it means.

No matter how it s created, music doesn't exist in a vacuum（真空） to the listener. The meaning we assign to music depends on its context - how the piece connects to other elements in our lives. Without context, music is like the results of a game whose rules have been lost. The context for a music is part of who you are. The music is emotional to you because you have the context to appreciate it. As it continues to evolve, AI music will develop its own context. Certainly, it'll be different from human-made music. It'll mix existing genres to create new ones; it'll combine instruments that we wouldn't think of combining. Its rules will be different.

I'm now always asked the same question: "Who put the emotion in that music: you, the composer, or the AI?" But that's not the question they really want to ask, though. There's a deeper question that most people are too afraid to ask right now: "Are my emotions so simple that they can be maneuvered by a machine?"

In my experience, this could be possible one day. If a modestly capable music AI in 2019 could stir up emotions of an audience, maybe AI can have a more powerful effect on our emotional lives than we'd like to admit.