7,967 research outputs found
Predicting Audio Advertisement Quality
Online audio advertising is a particular form of advertising used abundantly
in online music streaming services. In these platforms, which tend to host tens
of thousands of unique audio advertisements (ads), providing high quality ads
ensures a better user experience and results in longer user engagement.
Therefore, the automatic assessment of these ads is an important step toward
audio ads ranking and better audio ads creation. In this paper we propose one
way to measure the quality of the audio ads using a proxy metric called Long
Click Rate (LCR), which is defined by the amount of time a user engages with
the follow-up display ad (that is shown while the audio ad is playing) divided
by the impressions. We later focus on predicting the audio ad quality using
only acoustic features such as harmony, rhythm, and timbre of the audio,
extracted from the raw waveform. We discuss how the characteristics of the
sound can be connected to concepts such as the clarity of the audio ad message,
its trustworthiness, etc. Finally, we propose a new deep learning model for
audio ad quality prediction, which outperforms the other discussed models
trained on hand-crafted features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first large-scale audio ad quality prediction study.Comment: WSDM '18 Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on
Web Search and Data Mining, 9 page
The Skipping Behavior of Users of Music Streaming Services and its Relation to Musical Structure
The behavior of users of music streaming services is investigated from the
point of view of the temporal dimension of individual songs; specifically, the
main object of the analysis is the point in time within a song at which users
stop listening and start streaming another song ("skip"). The main contribution
of this study is the ascertainment of a correlation between the distribution in
time of skipping events and the musical structure of songs. It is also shown
that such distribution is not only specific to the individual songs, but also
independent of the cohort of users and, under stationary conditions, date of
observation. Finally, user behavioral data is used to train a predictor of the
musical structure of a song solely from its acoustic content; it is shown that
the use of such data, available in large quantities to music streaming
services, yields significant improvements in accuracy over the customary
fashion of training this class of algorithms, in which only smaller amounts of
hand-labeled data are available
Support the Underground: Characteristics of Beyond-Mainstream Music Listeners
Music recommender systems have become an integral part of music streaming
services such as Spotify and Last.fm to assist users navigating the extensive
music collections offered by them. However, while music listeners interested in
mainstream music are traditionally served well by music recommender systems,
users interested in music beyond the mainstream (i.e., non-popular music)
rarely receive relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study the
characteristics of beyond-mainstream music and music listeners and analyze to
what extent these characteristics impact the quality of music recommendations
provided. Therefore, we create a novel dataset consisting of Last.fm listening
histories of several thousand beyond-mainstream music listeners, which we
enrich with additional metadata describing music tracks and music listeners.
Our analysis of this dataset shows four subgroups within the group of
beyond-mainstream music listeners that differ not only with respect to their
preferred music but also with their demographic characteristics. Furthermore,
we evaluate the quality of music recommendations that these subgroups are
provided with four different recommendation algorithms where we find
significant differences between the groups. Specifically, our results show a
positive correlation between a subgroup's openness towards music listened to by
members of other subgroups and recommendation accuracy. We believe that our
findings provide valuable insights for developing improved user models and
recommendation approaches to better serve beyond-mainstream music listeners.Comment: Accepted for publication in EPJ Data Science - link to published
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Encouraging attention and exploration in a hybrid recommender system for libraries of unfamiliar music
There are few studies of user interaction with music libraries comprising solely of unfamiliar music, despite such music being represented in national music information centre collections. We aim to develop a system that encourages exploration of such a library. This study investigates the influence of 69 users’ pre-existing musical genre and feature preferences on their ongoing continuous real-time psychological affect responses during listening and the acoustic features of the music on their liking and familiarity ratings for unfamiliar art music (the collection of the Australian Music Centre) during a sequential hybrid recommender-guided interaction. We successfully mitigated the unfavorable starting conditions (no prior item ratings or participants’ item choices) by using each participant’s pre-listening music preferences, translated into acoustic features and linked to item view count from the Australian Music Centre database, to choose their seed item. We found that first item liking/familiarity ratings were on average higher than the subsequent 15 items and comparable with the maximal values at the end of listeners’ sequential responses, showing acoustic features to be useful predictors of responses. We required users to give a continuous response indication of their perception of the affect expressed as they listened to 30-second excerpts of music, with our system successfully providing either a “similar” or “dissimilar” next item, according to—and confirming—the utility of the items’ acoustic features, but chosen from the affective responses of the preceding item. We also developed predictive statistical time series analysis models of liking and familiarity, using music preferences and preceding ratings. Our analyses suggest our users were at the starting low end of the commonly observed inverted-U relationship between exposure and both liking and perceived familiarity, which were closely related. Overall, our hybrid recommender worked well under extreme conditions, with 53 unique items from 100 chosen as “seed” items, suggesting future enhancement of our approach can productively encourage exploration of libraries of unfamiliar music
Taste and the algorithm
Today, a consistent part of our everyday interaction with art and aesthetic artefacts occurs through digital media, and our preferences and choices are systematically tracked and analyzed by algorithms in ways that are far from transparent. Our consumption is constantly documented, and then, we are fed back through tailored information. We are therefore witnessing the emergence of a complex interrelation between our aesthetic choices, their digital elaboration, and also the production of content and the dynamics of creative processes. All are involved in a process of mutual influences, and are partially determined by the invisible guiding hand of algorithms.
With regard to this topic, this paper will introduce some key issues concerning the role of algorithms in aesthetic domains, such as taste detection and formation, cultural consumption and production, and showing how aesthetics can contribute to the ongoing debate about the impact of today’s “algorithmic culture”
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