Intelligent User Interfaces for Music Discovery

Peter Knees,Masataka Goto,Markus Schedl

doi:10.5334/tismir.60

Abstract

Assisting the user in finding music is one of the original motivations that led to the establishment of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) as a research field. This encompasses classic Information Retrieval inspired access to music repositories that aims at meeting an information need of an expert user. Beyond this, however, music as a cultural art form is also connected to an entertainment need of potential listeners, requiring more intuitive and engaging means for music discovery. A central aspect in this process is the user interface. In this article, we reflect on the evolution of MIR-driven intelligent user interfaces for music browsing and discovery over the past two decades. We argue that three major developments have transformed and shaped user interfaces during this period, each connected to a phase of new listening practices. Phase 1 has seen the development of content-based music retrieval interfaces built upon audio processing and content description algorithms facilitating the automatic organization of repositories and finding music according to sound qualities. These interfaces are primarily connected to personal music collections or (still) small commercial catalogs. Phase 2 comprises interfaces incorporating collaborative and automatic semantic description of music, exploiting knowledge captured in user-generated metadata. These interfaces are connected to collective web platforms. Phase 3 is dominated by recommender systems built upon the collection of online music interaction traces on a large scale. These interfaces are connected to streaming services. We review and contextualize work from all three phases and extrapolate current developments to outline possible scenarios of music recommendation and listening interfaces of the future.

Highlights

With its origins in Information Retrieval research, a fundamental goal of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) as a dedicated research field in the year 2000 was to develop technology to assist the user in finding music, information about music, or information in music (Byrd and Fingerhut, 2002)
The extracted user-generated metadata often pertains to semantic descriptions and complements the content-based methods that facilitated the developments of the preceding phase
2.3 Summary of Phase 1 Phase 1 is strongly connected to browsing interfaces that make use of features extracted from the signal and present repositories in a structured manner to make them accessible

Summary

Introduction

With its origins in Information Retrieval research, a fundamental goal of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) as a dedicated research field in the year 2000 was to develop technology to assist the user in finding music, information about music, or information in music (Byrd and Fingerhut, 2002). The extracted user-generated metadata often pertains to semantic descriptions and complements the content-based methods that facilitated the developments of the preceding phase This phase constitutes an intermediate step towards exploitation of collective listening data, which is the driving force behind the third, and ongoing phase, which is connected to streaming services (Section 4). The collection of online music interaction traces on a large scale and their exploitation in recommender systems are defining elements They provide essential gauges to the state of the art, and, even beyond, give perspective of what could be possible

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

The Next Phase

Conclusions and Discussion