Music Diary: Using ChatGPT to Craft Interactive Diaries with Emotional Music for Reflection and Sharing Real-life Emotions

A daily diary can benefit one's mental health and well-being by providing an outlet for emotional expression, self-reflection, and stress reduction. However, the traditional approach to diary writing is hindered by the lack of an intuitive mechanism to deal with emotional experiences via textual descriptions and a gradual decline in writing skills with the adoption of social media and messaging apps. This paper introduces a Music Diary app, which uses ChatGPT to summarize text and generate music that echoes the emotional state of the user. The results of this pilot study revealed that the Music Diary app potentially facilitates the creation of diary entries, while the musical soundtrack promotes intuitive awareness, reflection, and expression as well as one's willingness to share experiences on social platforms. In experiments, the proposed system was shown to make the process of keeping a diary more enjoyable and the novel format makes it possible to expand this personal activity to a wider social realm.