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Mood-based music applications
In practical MIR systems, the emotions or moods of the listener cannot be
directly measured with sensors; they have to be requested from the listener
using a dedicated user interface comprising, for example, buttons,
emoticons, textual labels, or a clickable emotion space. Given the mood
information, the music player application can then select suitable music by
comparing the information to the mood metadata stored within the music
library.
One example of a mood-based music application based on Thayer's
model is Moody (2011), which is a mood-based playlist generator for
iTunes. The iTunes music library is tagged along two axes, where the y-
axis represents intensity and the x-axis happiness. As a default, the axes
are colour-coded in such a way that red represents intensive but sad music,
yellow intense and happy music, blue calm and sad music, and green
happy but calm music. Once the library has been tagged, the user is able to
define new playlists based on his/her current mood by clicking on the
corresponding part of the screen. Another music player application
roughly following Thayer's model is the “Mood radio” mode of
Musicovery (2011), where the user can select music according to mood,
decade, and genre. The mood is selected by clicking on an x-y space,
where the y-axis has been mapped to energetic/calm music and the x-axis
to dark/positive music. The mapping has been done by the service
provider, and does not require extra effort from the user. In the case of
Mood Player from the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology
(2009), images and music are mapped to a 2D valence-arousal space. The
system can be used, for example, to automatically select suitable
background music for holiday pictures. In addition to 2D spaces, moods
and emotions have been visualized in various other ways including colour
maps, discs, vertical bars, icons (Kim et al. 2009), tag clouds, and
emoticons.
In the Colour Player application (Voong 2007), the user has to assign
tracks to colours manually based on the mood they convey. After creating
the associations, the user can access the music collection by interacting
with the resulting colour map. In a user study with nine participants, the
authors learned that the users liked the interface and recalled well the
colours used. Musicream (Goto & Goto 2005) visualizes songs using discs
flowing from taps at the top of the screen. The colours of taps and discs
reflect the mood of the songs; similar songs share the same colour.
Associating colours with musical genres has also been studied by, for
example, Holm et al. (2008) and Julia & Jorda (2009). With the
Moodagent application (2012), the user can adjust the height of five
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