Quantitative Study of Music Listening Behavior in a Smartphone Context

Abstract

Context-based services have attracted increasing attention because of the prevalence of sensor-rich mobile devices such as smartphones. The idea is to recommend information that a user would be interested in according to the user’s surrounding context. Although remarkable progress has been made to contextualize music playback, relatively little research has been made using a large collection of real-life listening records collected in situ . In light of this fact, we present in this article a quantitative study of the personal, situational, and musical factors of musical preference in a smartphone context, using a new dataset comprising the listening records and self-report context annotation of 48 participants collected over 3wk via an Android app. Although the number of participants is limited and the population is biased towards students, the dataset is unique in that it is collected in a daily context, with sensor data and music listening profiles recorded at the same time. We investigate 3 core research questions evaluating the strength of a rich set of low-level and high-level audio features for music usage auto-tagging (i.e., music preference in different user activities), the strength of time-domain and frequency-domain sensor features for user activity classification, and how user factors such as personality traits are correlated with the predictability of music usage and user activity, using a closed set of 8 activity classes. We provide an in-depth discussion of the main findings of this study and their implications for the development of context-based music services for smartphones.