Painting the city with music: context-aware mobile services for urban environment

Abstract

Music business is undergoing a tremendous change in the early twenty-first century. Similarly, the landscape of music delivery and discovery is drastically evolving because of new technologies. This paper presents SoundAbout, a platform for location-based music services. It enables new applications running on mobile phones and desktops. It allows users to share music and information about music they listened to in different locations. With SoundAbout people can experience music related to the different locations in various ways, for instance by seeing what music has been listened in different districts of the city during a particular time span, select a list of favourite artists or songs and attach that list in favourable location, and see who else in different locations share their taste in music. Our goal is to not only support musical serendipity, but also affect the city culture. With context-aware music services, it is possible to offer people new kinds of urban audio experiences. In this paper, we apply characteristics of psychogeography and graffiti painting as an inspiration for the design of service concepts for the platform.