Randomness As a Resource for Design

Proceedings of the 15th …, 2011

Currently available user interfaces for playlist generation allow creating playlists in various ways, within a spectrum from fully automatic to fully manual. However, it is not entirely clear how users interact with such systems in the field and whether different situations actually demand different interfaces. In this paper we describe Rush 2, a music interface for mobile touch-screen devices that incorporates three interaction modes with varying degrees of automation: Adding songs manually, in quick succession using the rush interaction technique or filling the playlist automatically. For all techniques various filters can be set. In a two-week diary study (with in-depth interaction logging) we gained insight into how people interact with music in their everyday lives and how much automation and interactivity are really necessary.

2015

Listeners have long been inspired to interact with music and create new representations of popular releases. Vinyl offered many opportunities to reappropriate chart music, from scratching and tempo manipulation to mixing multiple songs together. More recently, artists could engage their audience to interact with their music by offering mix-stems online for experimentation and sharing. With the extended processing power of mobile devices, the opportunities for interactive music are dramatically increasing.. This paper presents research that demonstrates a novel approach to interactive digital music. The research looks at the emergent format of the album app and extends existing paradigms of interactive music playback. The novel album app designed in this research presents a new opportunity for listeners to engage with recorded content by allowing them to explore alternative takes, renditions of a given song in multiple genres, and by allowing direct interaction with embedded mix-stem...

In this thesis, we explore designing for enjoyable interactions with public installations based on body motion tracking . We also discuss evaluation of user experience related to such installations. The subject of user experience (UX) is sparsely researched, and its theoretical foundations and methodological approaches are highly debated. A central issue within this debate is the transferability and application of different theories and concepts from research to specific UX design and evaluation practices. Another issue is the application of theories to the study of UX in different use contexts. To tackle these problems, we decided to ‘jump in at the deep end’. We set out to design an audiovisual installation that facilitated for enjoyable user experiences, without clearly defining our goals or methodological approach beforehand. We immersed ourselves in the subject matter throughout the design process by researching technologies, concepts, theories, and methods while doing practica...

This paper documents a design research made on a new type of digital device to browse a musical database and listen to selected soundtracks. Currently, accessing music through digital devices as MP3 players is not comfortable for such users as non-computer-skilled people; besides, in the same time, musical databases are getting larger, which makes the music searching job even more tortuous. Based on these observations, this work aims at designing a new interface that would allow a different type of interaction with music: an intuitive interaction. Design studies have shown that the most pleasurable and usable interfaces involve all users' skills, such as cognitive skills (frequently the only one required, as is today), emotional skills, as well as perceptive-motor skills. Therefore, we try here to design for the human user in his or her entire capabilities range, that's why the current interfaces are to be transformed into tangible ones, involving user's gestures that are meaningful in the context of action. Experiments are set up to evaluate pleasurability and usability of our proposal : a context for experience is created thanks to functional mock-ups, simulating the interaction with a new music navigation system. Thus, an evaluation can be made over the perception of the gestures operating the music browsing. This work ends up with a functional prototype of a new tangible interface for musical browsing, as well as an evaluation for it to validate the users' need for more meaning in action.

Psychology of Well-Being: Theory Research and Practice

The present research considered everyday music listening in the context of eight situations, classified as high or low on Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) dimensions. Completing a questionnaire, 344 participants considered the music they would select and created a playlist for a given situation. The music selected by participants (as playlists) for these eight situations differed along two dimensions, namely arousing and aesthetic. Rather than selecting music that would moderate arousal (Berlyne, 1971), results indicated that participants employed an arousal-optimization strategy. There were also differences in the music selected across situations on the aesthetic dimension. The findings also suggest that music chosen for situations is subject to injunctive norms, such that there was considerable variation between the music chosen for listening to on public transport or when washing dishes, whereas music selected for a wedding was perceived as more homogeneous. While previous research has considered music preference in terms of pleasure and arousal, the apparent role of injunctive norms may be related to dominance and requires additional research. More generally, the results indicate that Mehrabian and Russell’s PAD dimensions offer a useful framework for considering the relationship between music and the environmental context in which it is experienced.

The measurement of everyday music use remains a challenge for researchers, with many of the available methodologies limited by intrusiveness or lack of ecological validity. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) addresses such limitations by assessing current subjective experience at various times throughout participants’ everyday functioning. The aim of the current project was to develop and trial a mobile ESM (m-ESM) capable of collecting event-related data during natural listening episodes. This methodology was designed to maintain a natural and familiar listening experience for participants, and to collect real-time data on personal music listening. An application (app) was created which utilized mobile-device technology, and allowed combination of experience sampling with a personal music player. Analyses were performed on trial data from 101 participants to determine the efficacy of the m-ESM. Results indicated that this methodology would maintain ecological validity and cause minimal intrusion into everyday activities of the listener. Questionnaires were answered immediately at the time of listening, minimizing the problem of retrospective recall biases. This innovative methodology allows for the collection of a wealth of listening data that will advance the accurate measurement of everyday, personal music listening.

2013

This paper studies a MoodPic concept and a prototype implementation enabling collaborative creation of mood picture based musical playlists, evaluated qualitatively with 30 Finnish participants. In general, MoodPic was found to be a successful concept and stated to add novel experiences to music listening. Accessing music through mood pictures was highly appreciated and seen as a good way to discover new music over the genre boundaries and receive music recommendations from real users based on their mood picture interpretation. Sorting music based on mood pictures instead of genres was seen as an interesting and easy way to interact with music. Based on the interview results, this paper introduces several ideas for further improving the music listening experience using mood pictures as a basis for playlists. This paper summarizes the main findings and proposes an extensive set of generalized design implications to take into account when designing solutions for social music discovery.

2015

Utilizing the Experience Sampling Method, this research investigated how individuals encounter music in everyday life. Responding to two text messages sent at random times between 8:00 and 23:00 daily for one week, 177 participants completed self-reports online regarding their experience with any music heard within a two-hour period prior to receipt of the message. Overall, the radio, mobile MP3 players, and computers featured prominently. Detailed analyses revealed significant patterns in device usage based on time of day; ratings of the music in terms of choice, liking, arousal, and attention; mood; and the perceived consequences of the music. While feeling lethargic associated with recorded music broadcasted in public, in contrast personal music collections promoted contentment. Similarly, devices allowing for personal input were met with positive consequences, like motivation. The current findings imply that the greater control that technology affords leads to complex patterns of everyday music usage, and that listeners are active consumers rather than passive listeners.

2019

Music is well established as a means of social connection. In the age of streaming platforms, personalized playlists and recommendations are popular topics in music information retrieval. We bring the focus of music enjoyment back to social connection and examine how technologies can enhance interpersonal relationships, specifically through the context of the collaborative playlist (CP). We conducted an exploratory study of CP users and non-users (N=65) and examined speculative and experienced purposes and outcomes of CPs, as well as general perspectives on music and social connectedness. We derived a CP Framework with three purposes - Practical, Cognitive, and Social - and two connotations - Utility and Orientation. Both users and non-users shared similar perspectives on music-related activities and CP user outcomes. Projected and actual CP purposes differed between groups, however, as did perception of music's role in connectedness in recent years. These results highlight the ...

Popular Music and Society, 2015

Music streaming services encompass features that enable the organization of music into playlists. This article inquires how users describe and make sense of practices and experiences of creating, curating, maintaining, and using personal playlists. The analysis relies on a mixed-method study, including music-diary self-reports, online observations, and in-depth interviews with 12 heavy users of Spotify or/and WiMP Music. The findings suggest heterogeneous management of static and dynamic playlists based on structural and contextual schemes of aggregating music. User control motivates different playlist practices that demonstrate new ways of collecting music via streaming services but also derive from pre-digital collecting. Please contact me for the full version of the article!

Proliferation of new entertainment content services and contexts of use has made the entertainment products common in everyone’s life. In order to make them enjoyable to an end-user and successful on the market it is essential to ensure their usability, faultless functionality and high Quality of Service. In the future entertainment technology and academic research is an open challenge in the development of evaluation methods. Both, subjective and objective techniques are limited in their capabilities, because the Quality of Service in today’s entertainment products depends on a large number of factors: including devices, network, contexts of use, and their properties. This paper addresses the Quality of Service evaluation problem from the end-user’s point of view. The approach for development of evaluation methodology is presented. The domain explored in this paper is intended for designing pervasive entertainment systems. This approach may also be successfully adapted in other domains as well.

European Journal of Information Systems, 2017

Music is a self-evident crucial part of the human experience across cultures, with artefacts dating as far back as the last Ice Age. Music is, as well, an essential aspect of human communication, profoundly influencing the meaning of communication, perception, and behaviour. Music's critical role is recognised in many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and marketing. The objective of this Issues and Opinions paper is to discuss theoretical insights concerning the effects of music stimuli, and to describe how that insight applies to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contexts. As ICT becomes ever more ubiquitous, and as background music becomes ever more an integral part of ICT interfaces, including music in IS research presents increasing theoretical and practical importance. Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Ludwig van Beethoven

… on Ubiquitous Home–ubiquitous society and …, 2005

Abstract. In this paper we review the current understanding of aesthetics. There are three aspects to aesthetics namely: the form, the action and the experience. We explore these aspects and highlight their relevance for entertainment. We then investigate ubiquitous entertainment ...

2021

Music shuffling is a common feature, available in most audio players and music streaming platforms. The goal of this function is to let songs be played in random, or constrained random, order. The results obtained by in-use shuffling algorithms can be unsatisfactory due to several factors including: the variability of user expectations to what constitutes a "successful" playlist, the common bias of being unable to recognize true randomness, and the tendency of humans to find nonexistent patterns in random structures. In this paper, a new shuffling algorithm called Ruffle is presented. Ruffle lets the user decide which aspects of the music library have to be actually shuffled, and which features should remain unchanged between consecutive extractions. First, an online survey was conducted to collect users' feedback about the characteristics used for shuffling. It is worth noting that, in general, the algorithm could address any metadata and/or audio extracted feature. Then, in order to test the algorithm on personal playlists, a Web version based on Spotify API has been released. For this reason, a second survey is marking an ongoing effort placed on validating the effectiveness of the algorithm by collecting users' feedback, and measuring the level of user satisfaction.

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, 2015

This paper contributes novel measures of user engagement in mobile music retrieval, linking these to work in music psychology, and illustrating resulting design guidelines in a demonstrator system. The large music collections available to users today can be overwhelming in mobile settings, they offer 'too-much-choice' to users, who often resort to shufflebased playback. Work in music psychology has introduced the concept of music engagement -listeners vary in their desired control over their music listening, and engagement varies with listening context. We develop a series of metrics to capture music listening behaviour from users' interaction logs. In a survey of 94 music listeners, we show significant correlations between music engagement from questionnaires and the presented quantitative metrics. We show how music retrieval can adapt to this engagement, developing a tabletbased demonstrator system, with an exploratory evaluation.