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catalogue. An aesthetic design can also result in improved usability - as
shown by Norman (2004), “attractive things work better.” In the case of
mobile phones and other devices with limited screen estate, visualizations
can complement text-based UIs by showing additional dimensional
information on the screen.
Context-aware music
Mobile music players have capabilities that enable the creation of context-
aware music recommendations, that is, suggestions of music to match the
current situation of the listener. As context information typically includes
location, time, and activity (Dey & Abowd 1999), context-aware
recommendations can adapt to the location and time of music listening, in
addition to the user in question.
Another very important piece of context is the emotional state of the
listener. In practical systems, the emotions or moods of the listener cannot
be measured directly with sensors, but they can be requested from the user.
One way to do this is to use emoticons, which can then be employed to
recommend music from musical genres commonly related to those
emotions/moods (Holm et al. 2010). Another potential approach is to use
so-called “mood pictures,” i.e, pictures typically associated with a certain
mood. For example, most people may associate a picture of a fireplace
with calmness and relaxation.
To study the use of mood pictures in the context of music (streaming)
recommendation services, a hi-fi prototype application for a touch screen
PC was developed. In the prototype, the user interacts with a collection of
animated mood pictures to receive new music recommendations from the
associated genres. The playlist is generated on the basis of a set of selected
seed songs, and music is streamed from Nokia Research Centre's
SuperMusic service (Lehtiniemi 2008).
To study the prototype in practice, a qualitative and quantitative user
study with 40 participants was arranged. This chapter describes the
prototype implementation, discusses the results of the user study, and
suggests ideas for the further development of the concept.
Related research
This section provides relevant background information on Music
Information Retrieval (MIR), metadata, music discovery, and mood-based
music-listening applications.
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