Datafication and the push for ubiquitous listening in music streaming

This article discusses Spotify’s approach to music recommendation as datafication of listening. It discusses the hybrid types of music recommendation that Spotify presents to users. The article explores how datafication is connected to Spotify’s push for the personalization and contextualization of music recommendations based on a combination of the cultural knowledge found in editorial curation and the potential for large-scale personalization found in algorithmic curation. The article draws on the concept of ubiquitous music and other understandings of the affective and functional aspects of music listening as an everyday practice to reflect upon how Spotify’s approach to datafication of listening potentially leads it to prioritize music recommendations that entice users to engage in inattentive and continuous listening. In extension to this, the article seeks to contribute with knowledge about how the datafication of listening potentially shapes listening practices and conceptions of relevance and quality in music recommendation

Effects of music preference and selection on stress management

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaIn this busy society of ours, people push their limits to work better and harder/longer in order to remain competitive with their peers. The activities of the working population have increased daily which have, in turn, created more stressful situations and conditioned the welfare as well as the physical and mental abilities of the person. Nonetheless, working longer hours does not necessarily improve productivity nor performance. In order to prevent the negative consequences of this increasing trend, the evolution of performance throughout the workday should be more closely monitored.It is acknowledged that, during the day, the user is subjected to various factors that can affect his performance, such as stress. Stress is an ever-present factor these days and can be considered a major health problem. However, there also positives aspects, and this has made it an increasingly interesting topic of study in the scientific community. This work focuses on the interaction of stress with music, a broad phenomenon which is present in all societies. More specifically, we study the effects of music on human stress levels and emotions while performing daily activities, through the analysis the performance, try to understand how decreases along the day and how different types of music affect this phenomenon. The hypothesis presented here is analysed through a research study, which enables us to understand the effect of music on people and on their lives, more precisely in their performance at work. The results show not only that the type of music matters, but also that it is important to note the individual’s objective in each moment, as well as his personal preferences regarding music. With the results the aim is to create a music recommendation system based on the user’s stress level and the user’s performance, through the user’s interaction with the computer.Na sociedade atual as pessoas são cada mais vezes testadas até aos seus limites para poderem trabalhar mais e melhor, a fim de manter a competitividade ao máximo nível. As atividades do dia a dia da população continuam aumentar, o que cria situações de mais stress condicionando o bem-estar, bem como as capacidades físicas e mentais da pessoa. No entanto, trabalhar mais horas não significa necessariamente uma melhora da produtividade ou performance. A fim de evitar as consequências negativas desta tendência crescente, a evolução da performance ao longo de um dia de trabalho deve ser acompanhado mais de perto. É importante perceber que durante o dia as pessoas estão sujeitas a vários factores que podem afetar a sua performance, como o stress. O stress é um factor cada vez mais presente nos dias de hoje e pode ser considerado um problema. No entanto, há também aspectos positivos, tornando-se um tema cada vez mais interessante de estudo na comunidade científica. Neste trabalho é realizado um estudo, que terá como objectivo perceber a interação do stress com a música, um fenómeno presente em todas as sociedades. Especificamente, estudar os efeitos da música a nível de stress e emoções durante a execução das atividades diárias, através da análise da performance, no qual tentamos entender como está decresce ao longo do dia e como diferentes tipos de musica afeta este fenómeno. Esta hipótese apresentada é analisada através do estudo da performance, no qual nos permite entender os efeitos da musica nas pessoas e na suas vidas, mais precisamente das suas performance durante os seus trabalhos. Os resultados demonstra nos que não é so importante o tipo de musica, mas tambem é importante perceber o objectivo do utilizador bem como as suas preferencias musicais. Com os resultados obtidos o principal objectivo é criar um sistema de recomendação de musica baseado nos níveis de stress e performance do utilizador, através da interação do utilizador com o computador.The activities of working population increase daily in our society, which create more stressful situations and condition the welfare as well as the physical and mental abilities of the person. Stress is a factor more present these days and can be considered a problem. However, there also positives aspects, making it an increasingly interesting topic of study in the scientific community. In this work a study will be carried out that will focus on the interaction of stress with music, a broad phenomenon, present in all societies. Specifically, we will be study the effects of music on human stress level while performing daily activities

Hybrids and Fragments: Music, Genre, Culture and Technology

Technologies are fundamental to music and its marketing and dissemination, as is the categorisation of music by genre. In this research we examine the relationship between musical genre and technology by examining genre proliferation, fragmentation and hybridity. We compare the movement of musical artists between genres in various technological eras, and evaluate the connections between the dissemination of music and its categorisation. Cultural hybridity and fragmentation is thought to be the norm in the globalised era by many scholars, and the online music environment appears to be populated by hybrid genres and micro-genres. To examine this we study the representation of musical genre on the Internet. We acquire data from three main sources: The Echo Nest, a music-intelligence system, and two collectively constructed knowledge-bases, Wikidata and MusicBrainz. We discover geographical and commercial biases. We calculate genre inception dates in order to examine category proliferation, and construct networks from these data, using the relationships between artists and genres to establish structure. Using network analyses to quantify genre hybridity we find increasing hybridisation, peaking at various periods in different datasets. Statistical analyses, comparing hybridity within our various data, validates our method and reveals a relationship between the activity of editing music information and the movement of musical artists between musical genres. We also find evidence for the fragmentation of genre and the appearance of micro- genres. We consider artists that are invisible in mainstream systems using data from three alternative platforms, Bandcamp, CD Baby and SoundCloud, and examine rapid genre proliferation in Spotify. We then discuss hybridity and fragmentation in relation to postmodernity, hypermodernity and unimodernity, music and genre within society, and the ways genre intersects with technology

Playin’ the city : artistic and scientific approaches to playful urban arts

An Theorien und Diskussionen über die Stadt mangelt es nicht, denn Städte dienen uns u.a. als Projektionsfläche zur Auseinandersetzung mit unserer Vergangenheit, der Gegenwart und unserer Zukunft. Diese Ausgabe 1 (2016) der Navigationen untersucht spielerische Formen dieser Auseinandersetzung in und mit der Stadt durch die sogenannten playful urban arts.The city has been discussed and theorized widely, and it continues to serve as a space in which our sense of the present, past, and future is constantly negotiated. This issue 1 (2016) of Navigationen examines new ways of engaging with cities through what are called the playful urban arts. Playful engagements with the urban environment frequently strive to create new ways of imagining and experiencing the city. In and through play, city spaces can become playgrounds that have the potential to transform people’s sense of themselves as human actors in an urban network of spatially bound and socio-economically grounded actions. Emerging from the playin’siegen urban games festival 2015, the essays and panel discussions assembled in this issue provide an interdisciplinary account of the contemporary playful urban arts. Wiht contributions by Miguel Sicart, Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, Judith Ackermann and Martin Reiche, Michael Straeubig and Sebastian Quack, Marianne Halblaub Miranda and Martin Knöll, and Anne Lena Hartman

Designing Archival Collections to Support Language Revitalization: Case Study of the Boro Language Resource

Indigenous communities around the world are losing their languages at accelerating rates to the effects of the climate crisis and global capitalism. To preserve samples of these languages facing endangerment and extinction, samples of language use (e.g., audio-video recordings, photographs, textual transcriptions, translations, and analyses) are created and stored in language archives: repositories intended to provide long-term preservation of and access to language materials. In recent years, archives of all kinds are considering their origins and audiences. With the emergence of the community paradigm of archiving framework, the roles of archivists, communities, and institutions are under re-examination. Language archives too are reflecting this trend, as it becomes more common for speakers of Indigenous languages (also known as language communities) to document and archive their own languages and histories. As the landscape of language archiving expands, we now see increased emphasis on the re-use of archival material, particularly to support language revitalization—efforts to increase and maintain the use of the language. There are calls for language documentation (and, by extension, language archiving) to prioritize revitalization efforts. This dissertation is a case study of one language archive collection: the Boro Language Resource in the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) archive. The Boro Language Resource was created by Boro community members who are both experienced in linguistics and pedagogy and active in language revitalization efforts including research, educational, and cultural initiatives. This case study explores how the collection was designed, and how the material will be used in future language revitalization activities. Because this collection exemplifies the view of language documentation and archiving as revitalization-driven practices, the findings of this case study stand to inform future community archiving efforts aiming to support language revitalization

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

Understanding Musicking on Social Media: Music Sharing, Sociality and Citizenship

Based on online and offline ethnographic fieldwork among the Spanish community in London, this thesis investigates why people circulate and share music on social media platforms, particularly within a context of migration. Written from the perspective of an insider-outsider, it combines research data from ethnographic participant observation and interviews to understand how music media circulates online, studying the different roles it fulfils within these contexts as different forms of musicking. The thesis responds to these questions by addressing six areas. Chapter 1 explores the uses of music to perform and articulate cultural and gender identity on social media profiles. Chapter 2 investigates how music sharing and compiling can be used to maintain relationships and social capital and to participate in transnational sociality. Chapter 3 addresses how the circulation of music parody as citizen engagement in contexts of political conflict such as the Brexit and Catalonian referendums gives rise to temporary political alliances in the form of citizen assemblages. Chapter 4 considers the circulation of music on social media from the perspective of fandom and how it is influenced by post-object ephemeral and reflexive practices. Chapter 5 analyses how the ubiquitous and imagined character of online music media fosters its circulation as a silent and visual element of online sociality, effectively generating practices of imagined listening. Chapter 6 examines ritualistic practices of music exchange on social media and their relationship with emerging moral economies of music circulation as foundational elements of online sociality and citizenship. I conclude by arguing that, in circulating music online through their social media and streaming profiles, users develop new forms of (im)material culture-making. Online musicking enables new ways of being in the world, turning the intangible, time-bound aural and visual experience of online music into something that has a materialised impact in the social lives of users. Through the circulation of music online users form, dissolve and inhabit temporary music-based alliances and expand their social worlds