Facilitating Mobile Music Sharing and Social Interaction with Push!Music

Push!Music is a novel mobile music listening and sharing system, where users automatically receive songs that have autonomously recommended themselves from nearby players depending on similar listening behaviour and music history. Push!Music also enables users to wirelessly send songs between each other as personal recommendations. We conducted a two-week preliminary user study of Push!Music, where a group of five friends used the application in their everyday life. We learned for example that the shared music in Push!Music became a start for social interaction and that received songs in general were highly appreciated and could be looked upon as ‘treats’

Organising music for movies

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss the classification of commercial popular music when large digital collections are organised for use in films. Design/methodology/approach - A range of systems are investigated and their organization is discussed, focusing on an analysis of the metadata used by the systems and choices given to the end-user to construct a query. The indexing of the music is compared to a checklist of music facets which has been derived from recent musicological literature on semiotic analysis of popular music. These facets include aspects of communication, cultural and musical expression, codes and competences. Findings -In addition to bibliographic detail, descriptive metadata is used to organise music in these systems. Genre, subject and mood are used widely; some musical facets also appear. The extent to which attempts are being made to reflect these facets in the organization of these systems is discussed. A number of recommendations are made which may help to improve this process. Originality/value - This paper discusses an area of creative music search which has not previously been investigated in any depth and makes recommendations based on findings and the literature which may be used in the development of commercial systems as well as making a contribution to the literature

People-Powered Music: Using User-Generated Tags and Structure in Recommendations

Music recommenders often rely on experts to classify song facets like genre and mood, but user-generated folksonomies hold some advantages over expert classifications—folksonomies can reflect the same real-world vocabularies and categorizations that end users employ. We present an approach for using crowd-sourced common sense knowledge to structure user-generated music tags into a folksonomy, and describe how to use this approach to make music recommendations. We then empirically evaluate our “people-powered” structured content recommender against a more traditional recommender. Our results show that participants slightly preferred the unstructured recommender, rating more of its recommendations as “perfect” than they did for our approach. An exploration of the reasons behind participants’ ratings revealed that users behaved differently when tagging songs than when evaluating recommendations, and we discuss the implications of our results for future tagging and recommendation approaches

Documenting praxis shock in early-career Australian music teachers: the impact of pre-service teacher education

[Abstract]: Early-career music teachers are well placed to comment on the effectiveness of pre-service teacher education. Their perceptions are particularly relevant in determining why music teachers are ‘burning out’ at an early stage of their career. This paper explores 15 early-career Australian music teachers’ perceptions of their job, and their perceived preparedness for the workforce. Their stories suggest that although they feel a ‘passion’ towards teaching music, they see their early experiences in secondary schools as a time where they will either ‘sink or swim’, and where they see themselves as a ‘one-man-band’. Analysis suggests that praxis shock in early-career music teachers is directly related to the unique experiences of being a music teacher. The paper concludes with recommendations for pre-service courses to address issues of praxis shock in early-career music teachers

Content or context? Searching for musical meaning in task-based interactive information retrieval

Creative professionals search for digital music to accompany moving images using interactive information retrieval systems run by music publishers and record companies. This research investigates the creative professionals and the intermediaries communication processes and information seeking and use behaviour with a view to making recommendations to information retrieval systems builders as to the extent of relative importance of content and contextual factors. A communications model is used to suggest that the meaning of music is determined by its listener and use context, as well as cultural codes and competences. The research is framed by a holistic approach based on Ingwersen and Jarvelin’s Interactive Information Seeking, Retrieval and Behavioral processes model

What makes an audience? Investigating the roles and experiences of listeners at a chamber music festival

The views of audience members on their listening experiences are rarely heard in the research literature, although much speculation occurs on their roles and perspectives. This article reports on an investigation of audience experiences at a chamber music festival, and examines the ways in which social and musical enjoyment interact to generate commitment and a sense of involvement in the event. Audience members’ anxieties for the future of classical music listening are discussed, and recommendations made for research and practice that could recognise more effectively the central role of the listener in contemporary musical life