A spatial hypertext-based, personal digital library for capturing and organizing musical moments

Abstract

We describe the design, development, and evaluation of a personal digital music library application designed to assist musicians in capturing, developing, and managing their musical ideas over time. The target user group is musicians who primarily use audio and text for composition and arrangement, rather than with formal music notation. The software design was guided by a formative user study which suggested five requirements for the software to support: capturing, overdubbing, developing, archiving, and organizing. This led to a spatial hypermedia approach forming the basis for the developed application. Furthermore, the underlying spatial data-model was exploited to give raw audio compositions a hierarchical structure, and—to aid musicians in retrieving previous ideas—a search facility was provided to support both query by humming and text-based queries. A user evaluation of the implemented environment indicated that the target musicians would find the hypermedia environment useful for capturing and managing their moments of musical creativity. More specifically, they would make use of the query by humming facility and the hierarchical track organization, but not the overdubbing facility as implemented.