Design and Evaluation of a Probabilistic Music Projection Interface

We describe the design and evaluation of a probabilistic interface for music exploration and casual playlist generation. Predicted subjective features, such as mood and genre, inferred from low-level audio features create a 34- dimensional feature space. We use a nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithm to create 2D music maps of tracks, and augment these with visualisations of probabilistic mappings of selected features and their uncertainty. We evaluated the system in a longitudinal trial in users’ homes over several weeks. Users said they had fun with the interface and liked the casual nature of the playlist generation. Users preferred to generate playlists from a local neighbourhood of the map, rather than from a trajectory, using neighbourhood selection more than three times more often than path selection. Probabilistic highlighting of subjective features led to more focused exploration in mouse activity logs, and 6 of 8 users said they preferred the probabilistic highlighting mode

Exploring social music behaviour: An investigation of music selection at parties

This paper builds an understanding how music is currently listened to by small (fewer than 10 individuals) to medium-sized (10 to 40 individuals) gatherings of people— how songs are chosen for playing, how the music fits in with other activities of group members, who supplies the music, the hardware/software that supports song selection and presentation. This fine-grained context emerges from a qualitative analysis of a rich set of participant observations and interviews focusing on the selection of songs to play at social gatherings. We suggest features for software to support music playing at parties

FM radio: family interplay with sonic mementos

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger

Visual collaging of music in a digital library

This article explores the role visual browsing can play within a digital music library. The context to the work is provided through a review of related techniques drawn from the fields of digital libraries and human computer interaction. Implemented within the open source digital library toolkit Greenstone, a prototype system is described that combines images located through textual metadata with a visualisation technique known as collaging to provide a leisurely, undirected interaction with a music collection. Emphasis in the article is given to the augmentations of the basic technique to work in the musical domain

The Digital Difference of Online Social Networking in the Carribean

Users of online social networking sites have made significant advances in the development of global virtual communities. With their origins in listservs, egroups, blogs, chat rooms and instant messaging, social networking sites provide opportunities for users with required skills, to construct public or semi-public profiles, to interact with ???friends??? and colleagues across the globe and to collaboratively create social capital. The presentation will focus on the impact of social networking on the Caribbean. It will examine participation of Caribbean people, including candidates in recent general elections held in 2007 and 2008, in popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. The assessment will cover factors influencing membership and participation, conditions under which content is created and information shared, as well as issues of privacy and protection. In recognition of the successes of these sites in facilitating interaction among large geographically dispersed groups of users, sharing content, collaborating with peers, and linking communities, the presentation will also examine and assess the role of information literacy the activities of library social networking sites, and their contribution to the development of interactive information resources in the social sciences.International Federation of Library AssociationsUniversity of Toronto, LibraryUniversity of Toronto, Faculty of InformationUniversity of Illinois, LibraryTitle VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A060066)unpublishednot peer reviewe

Towards the design of a kid’s music organizer

In this paper, we investigate how young children aged 2 to 5 interact with music and their family's music collections. By going into their homes, interviewing them and their parents and observing the children performing a range of music-related tasks, we explore the way that pre-school children select, interact with, and organize music. Additionally, drawing tasks were included in the visits to engage the children and allow them to demonstrate their thoughts in a concrete manner. Insights into the children's' music behaviours suggest design features for a music organizer / player for very young children