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When users generate music playlists: When words leave off, music begins?
Music systems that generate playlists are gaining increasing popularity, yet ways to select songs to be acceptable to users is still elusive. We present the results of an explorative study that focused on the language of musically untrained end users for playlist choices, in a variety of listening contexts. Our results indicate that there are a number of opportunities for playlist recommendation or retrieval systems, particularly by taking context into account
Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years,
thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which
nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip.
While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these
huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In
particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation
strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or
content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener
needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and
related publications quite sparse.
The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify
and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research
is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of
the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second,
we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further
evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving
the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and
providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet
under-researched, directions in the field
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
Large-Scale User Modeling with Recurrent Neural Networks for Music Discovery on Multiple Time Scales
The amount of content on online music streaming platforms is immense, and
most users only access a tiny fraction of this content. Recommender systems are
the application of choice to open up the collection to these users.
Collaborative filtering has the disadvantage that it relies on explicit
ratings, which are often unavailable, and generally disregards the temporal
nature of music consumption. On the other hand, item co-occurrence algorithms,
such as the recently introduced word2vec-based recommenders, are typically left
without an effective user representation. In this paper, we present a new
approach to model users through recurrent neural networks by sequentially
processing consumed items, represented by any type of embeddings and other
context features. This way we obtain semantically rich user representations,
which capture a user's musical taste over time. Our experimental analysis on
large-scale user data shows that our model can be used to predict future songs
a user will likely listen to, both in the short and long term.Comment: Author pre-print version, 20 pages, 6 figures, 4 table
Information-theoretic measures of music listening behaviour
We present an information-theoretic approach to the mea-
surement of users’ music listening behaviour and selection of music features. Existing
ethnographic studies of mu- sic use have guided the design of music retrieval systems however are
typically qualitative and exploratory in nature. We introduce the SPUD dataset, comprising 10, 000
hand- made playlists, with user and audio stream metadata. With this, we illustrate the use of
entropy for analysing music listening behaviour, e.g. identifying when a user changed music
retrieval system. We then develop an approach to identifying music features that reflect users’
criteria for playlist curation, rejecting features that are independent of user behaviour. The
dataset and the code used to produce it are made available. The techniques described support a
quantitative yet user-centred approach to the evaluation of music features and retrieval systems,
without assuming objective ground truth labels
Information-theoretic measures of music listening behaviour
We present an information-theoretic approach to the mea-
surement of users’ music listening behaviour and selection of music features. Existing
ethnographic studies of mu- sic use have guided the design of music retrieval systems however are
typically qualitative and exploratory in nature. We introduce the SPUD dataset, comprising 10, 000
hand- made playlists, with user and audio stream metadata. With this, we illustrate the use of
entropy for analysing music listening behaviour, e.g. identifying when a user changed music
retrieval system. We then develop an approach to identifying music features that reflect users’
criteria for playlist curation, rejecting features that are independent of user behaviour. The
dataset and the code used to produce it are made available. The techniques described support a
quantitative yet user-centred approach to the evaluation of music features and retrieval systems,
without assuming objective ground truth labels
The Music Streaming Sessions Dataset
At the core of many important machine learning problems faced by online
streaming services is a need to model how users interact with the content.
These problems can often be reduced to a combination of 1) sequentially
recommending items to the user, and 2) exploiting the user's interactions with
the items as feedback for the machine learning model. Unfortunately, there are
no public datasets currently available that enable researchers to explore this
topic. In order to spur that research, we release the Music Streaming Sessions
Dataset (MSSD), which consists of approximately 150 million listening sessions
and associated user actions. Furthermore, we provide audio features and
metadata for the approximately 3.7 million unique tracks referred to in the
logs. This is the largest collection of such track metadata currently available
to the public. This dataset enables research on important problems including
how to model user listening and interaction behaviour in streaming, as well as
Music Information Retrieval (MIR), and session-based sequential
recommendations.Comment: 3 pages, introducing a new large scale datase
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