arXiv subjects

Manuel Anglada-Tort

Publications and source records attributed to Manuel Anglada-Tort.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Collective creativity in hybrid societies

Generative AI is changing how cultural artifacts are created and circulated, and with it our understanding of creativity itself. Researchers disagree about whether these tools enrich or impoverish culture, and we argue that much of that disagreement comes from conflating two distinct components of creativity: novelty, a property of single artifacts, and diversity, a property of populations. We argue further that creativity in the context of generative AI is best understood as a property of hybrid collectives, or populations of interacting people and algorithms, rather than of individuals. AI-assisted ideation reliably raises the novelty of individual output while narrowing diversity in the aggregate, but this is not an inevitable consequence of putting machines in the loop. Because humans and models search in complementary ways, mixed groups can outperform and out-diversify groups of either kind alone, and machine-discovered solutions can enter human culture and persist there. What decides the outcome is composition: which agents are present, in what proportion, and how they are connected. The question is no longer whether AI helps or harms creativity, but which mixtures let individual gains accumulate without eroding collective diversity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Do Melody and Rhythm Coevolve?

Music comprises two core structural components, melody and rhythm, that vary widely across cultures. Whether these components coevolve in a coupled way or follow independent trajectories remains unclear. We introduce a novel computational pipeline to extract vocal melodic pitch-interval and percussive inter-onset timing distributions from 27,628 popular songs across 59 countries, enabling large-scale cross-cultural comparison that bypasses traditional music annotations. Musical similarities between countries aligned with geographic and linguistic relationships, validating our approach. Substantial variation emerged in both melodic and rhythmic structures across countries, yet the diversity of the two components was not significantly correlated, challenging assumptions of coupled evolution. Only rhythmic diversity was significantly associated with ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity, while melodic diversity showed no such association. These findings suggest that melody and rhythm constitute partially independent systems shaped by distinct cultural and evolutionary pressures, rather than components of a single monolithic musical style.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

GlobalMood: A cross-cultural benchmark for music emotion recognition

Human annotations of mood in music are essential for music generation and recommender systems. However, existing datasets predominantly focus on Western songs with terms derived from English, which may limit generalizability across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We introduce 'GlobalMood', a novel cross-cultural benchmark dataset comprising 1,180 songs sampled from 59 countries, with large-scale annotations collected from 2,519 individuals across five culturally and linguistically distinct locations: U.S., France, Mexico, S. Korea, and Egypt. Rather than imposing predefined emotion and mood categories, we implement a bottom-up, participant-driven approach to organically elicit culturally specific music-related emotion terms. We then recruit another pool of human participants to collect 988,925 ratings for these culture-specific descriptors. Our analysis confirms the presence of a valence-arousal structure shared across cultures, yet also reveals significant divergences in how certain emotion terms (despite being dictionary equivalents) are perceived cross-culturally. State-of-the-art multimodal models benefit substantially from fine-tuning on our cross-culturally balanced dataset, particularly in non-English contexts. Broadly, our findings inform the ongoing debate on the universality versus cultural specificity of emotional descriptors, and our methodology can contribute to other multimodal and cross-lingual research.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

The Dynamics of Collective Creativity in Human-AI Hybrid Societies

Generative AI is shaping an increasingly hybrid society, where ideas and cultural artefacs are created both by humans and intelligent machines. Human creativity is influenced in complex, nonlinear ways by the actions of AI-driven agents within their social networks, but these influences are difficult to measure using traditional methods. This study examines how human-AI interactions shape the evolution of collective creation within large-scale social network experiments, where human and AI participants collectively create stories. Participants (either humans or AI) joined 5x5 grid-based networks in which stories were selected, modified, and shared over many iterations. Initially, AI-only networks showed greater creativity (rated by a separate group of human raters) and collective diversity of stories than human-only and human-AI networks. However, over time, hybrid human-AI networks became more diverse in their creations than AI-only networks. In part, this is because AI agents retained little from the original stories, while human-only networks preserved continuity. These findings highlight the value of experimental social networks in understanding human-AI hybrid societies.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Characterizing the Interaction of Cultural Evolution Mechanisms in Experimental Social Networks

Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and reproduction (how are they copied?) have all been proposed as key influencing factors. However, prior research has rarely studied them together due to methodological challenges. We address this gap through a controlled naturalistic paradigm whereby participants (N=2,404) are placed in networks and are asked to iteratively choose and sing back melodies from their neighbors. We show that this setting yields melodies that are more complex and more pleasant than those found in the more-studied linear transmission setting, and exhibits robust differences across topologies. Crucially, these differences are diminished when selection or reproduction bias are eliminated, suggesting an interaction between mechanisms. These findings shed light on the interplay of mechanisms underlying the evolution of cultural artifacts.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Gibbs Sampling with People

A core problem in cognitive science and machine learning is to understand how humans derive semantic representations from perceptual objects, such as color from an apple, pleasantness from a musical chord, or seriousness from a face. Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People (MCMCP) is a prominent method for studying such representations, in which participants are presented with binary choice trials constructed such that the decisions follow a Markov Chain Monte Carlo acceptance rule. However, while MCMCP has strong asymptotic properties, its binary choice paradigm generates relatively little information per trial, and its local proposal function makes it slow to explore the parameter space and find the modes of the distribution. Here we therefore generalize MCMCP to a continuous-sampling paradigm, where in each iteration the participant uses a slider to continuously manipulate a single stimulus dimension to optimize a given criterion such as 'pleasantness'. We formulate both methods from a utility-theory perspective, and show that the new method can be interpreted as 'Gibbs Sampling with People' (GSP). Further, we introduce an aggregation parameter to the transition step, and show that this parameter can be manipulated to flexibly shift between Gibbs sampling and deterministic optimization. In an initial study, we show GSP clearly outperforming MCMCP; we then show that GSP provides novel and interpretable results in three other domains, namely musical chords, vocal emotions, and faces. We validate these results through large-scale perceptual rating experiments. The final experiments use GSP to navigate the latent space of a state-of-the-art image synthesis network (StyleGAN), a promising approach for applying GSP to high-dimensional perceptual spaces. We conclude by discussing future cognitive applications and ethical implications.

q-bio.NC↗