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“mood” bars (sensual, tender, joy, aggressive, and tempo) to affect the
contents of the generated playlist. In the StereoMood (2012) web radio,
the user selects the desired mood from a word cloud, after which the
playback of related music starts immediately.
MoodTunes Lite (WhoopApps 2009) visualizes moods as coloured
emoticons. To use the application, the user selects one of five predefined
moods (angry, bumpin, grooving, happy, or pumped), or creates new
mood definitions with custom pictures. Each mood can be mapped to any
number of genres from the user's music library; when the user picks a
mood, songs from the associated genres start to play. Holm et al. (2010),
on the other hand, investigated which musical genres people listen to in
different emotional states and whether these genres and states can be
visualized with descriptive emoticons. Seven emoticons (“sad,” “angry,”
“happy,” “neutral,” “annoyed,” “feeling great,” and “sleepy”) were
designed. Based on the results of an online survey, the publication
presented collections of genres that could be used as a starting point for
making recommendations fitting the current mood of the user.
This chapter presents another potential approach to visualize moods
and generate musical playlists. With “mood pictures,” the user selects a
picture reflecting his/her current emotional state. For example, most
people would likely associate a picture of a crying person with sadness.
Prototype
To enable the use of different platforms (including personal computers and
mobile devices such as the Nokia N900), our mood pictures prototype was
implemented as a Flash application. The main test platform was an HP
Pavilion tx2500 touch screen laptop. A main design driver was that the
prototype should be so easy to use that it could be learned after using it for
only a while. The number of UI elements was kept to a minimum; the
elements were designed so they could be operated with fingers.
When the user starts the application, one of the seven built-in mood
pictures is displayed and music starts to play (Fig. 11.2).
Touching the picture brings up a playlist of 20 tracks associated with
the mood picture. The user can also change the order of tracks in the
playlist, delete tracks, and add additional songs to the playlist using one of
the songs as a seed song for further recommendations.
New recommendations are visualized in the top right corner of the
screen using album cover art, and the user is able to drag these songs to the
playlist. The view also shows the progress of the song currently playing
and basic play controls such as play, pause, and skip to previous/next
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