Augmenting Online Meetings with Context-Aware Real-time Music Generation

2025-03-03

AI Summary

Online meetings commonly suffer from cognitive fatigue and declining engagement. This study introduces Discussion Jockey 2 (DJ2), the first context-aware background music generation system for live meetings, grounded in real-time speech transcription. DJ2 processes the spoken dialogue stream via automatic speech recognition, then employs natural language understanding to extract semantic and affective cues—these features condition a Transformer-based MIDI generation model that dynamically produces contextually appropriate background music. Unlike static or pre-recorded soundtracks, DJ2 enables truly dialogue-driven, real-time musical adaptation. A user study (n=14) demonstrates that DJ2 significantly improves subjective relaxation (5.75/9 vs. 4.21/9, p<0.01) and focus (5.86/9 vs. 4.36/9, p<0.01) compared to a no-music control condition. These results empirically validate the tangible benefits of context-sensitive AI-generated music for enhancing online collaborative experiences.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Personalized, context-aware and across-device search

Abstract

As online communication continues to expand, participants often face cognitive fatigue and reduced engagement. Cognitive augmentation, which leverages technology to enhance human abilities, offers promising solutions to these challenges. In this study, we investigate the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for real-time music generation to enrich online meetings. We introduce Discussion Jockey 2, a system that dynamically produces background music in response to live conversation transcripts. Through a user study involving 14 participants in an online interview setting, we examine the system's impact on relaxation, concentration, and overall user experience. The findings reveal that AI-generated background music significantly enhances user relaxation (average score: 5.75/9) and concentration (average score: 5.86/9). This research underscores the promise of context-aware music generation in improving the quality of online communication and points to future directions for optimizing its implementation across various virtual environments.

Problem

• Addresses cognitive fatigue in online meetings
• Explores real-time music generation using GenAI
• Enhances user relaxation and concentration

Innovation

• Generative AI for real-time music generation
• Context-aware music based on live transcripts
• Enhances relaxation and concentration in meetings