Listen to Music Search with Auditory Display Interfaces

stop looking for music
and start listening to it:

auditory display in music information retrieval interfaces

Becky Stewart
rebecca.stewart@eecs.qmul.ac.uk

Centre for Digital Music
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary, University of London

In this talk we will ...

• Review how search and browse for information



• Look at current commercially-available interfaces




• Discuss why listening should be integrated





• Look at solutions presented by academia






• Review recent research from C4DM






• Review recent research from C4DM

• Wrap up and conclude

let’s start with something easy...

Familiar interface

Summarizes information

Users seldom scroll down, almost never go to next page

Easy to traverse information

Relationships between items can be inferred

Encourages browsing

what about something other than text?

Users seldom go on to next page of results

Broad overview, but can zoom in on speciﬁc result

All other information beyond image is suppressed, but recallable

Less helpful than the image search results

Difficult to navigate results

Have to go to web page to view any portion of the video

Music or audio results only is not an option

so what about music interfaces?
how do we ﬁnd music?

commercial interfaces use a combination
of text ﬁelds and seed songs/artists


academic interfaces like maps



for searches results are lists of text perhaps enhanced with images,
general knowledge and hyperlinks



for searches results are lists of text perhaps enhanced with images,
general knowledge and hyperlinks

songs are played back one at a time and only if explicitly requested by user

Also a recent increase in
network interaction paradigms.

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history

Joan as Police Woman

Mystery Jets
Enter artist name

Jeremy Warmsley Alanis Morissette

Laura Marling Nellie McKay

Emmy the Great Ani DiFranco

Kimya Dawson

Basia Bulat Aimee Mann

Fiona Apple
Regina Spektor Liz Phair

Imogen Heap
Fast As You Can Sara Bareilles
Fiona Apple Rilo Kiley

Sarah McLachlan

Tori Amos
00:22

Maze Radio

Fiona Apple has been
visited 376 times.
Powered by The Echo Nest. Music powered by Rdio More info at Music Machinery Check out the Labyrinth of Genre

why should audio be integrated?

Bjork / Björk

• textual metadata can be malformed or wrong

• an empty text field is less than inspiring

• text can be a barrier to discovery

• previous knowledge is needed

• difficult to move into tail, will stay in the head
Celma and Cano From hits to niches? or how popular artists can bias music recommendation and discovery. In
Proc. of 2nd Workshop on Large-Scale Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize Competition (ACM KDD),
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, August 2008.

listening makes a difference

• users make different judgements about playlists when metadata is missing

L. Barrington, R. Oda, and G. Lanckriet. Smarter than Genius: human evaluation of music recommender
systems. In Proc. of ISMIR’09: 10th Int.Society for Music Information Retrieval Conf., pages 357–362, Kobe,
Japan, October 2009.

listening is faster

• when search results are compiled into a single audio stream instead of a list
of results, users find what they are looking for quicker

S. Ali and P. Aarabi. A cyclic interface for the presentation of multiple music files. IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, 10
(5):780–793, August 2008.

• listeners can find music without a GUI faster than with an iPod, and be just as
happy with their selection

Andreja Andric, Pierre-Louis Xech, and Andrea Fantasia, “Music mood wheel: Improving browsing experience on
digital content through an audio interface,”in Proc. of 2nd Int. Conf. on Automated Production of Cross Media
Content for Multi-Channel Distribution (AXMEDIS’06), 2006.

listening is effective

• users can understand and navigate a collection of music as effectively
without a GUI as with one

• they are slower, but don’t make signiﬁcantly more mistakes

S. Pauws, D. Bouwhuis, and B. Eggen. Programming and enjoying music with your eyes closed. In CHI ’00:
Proc. of the SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 376–383. ACM, 2000. doi:
10.1145/332040.332460.

how can interfaces use more listening?

mused

• passive listening

G. Coleman. Mused: navigating the personal
sample library. In Proc. of ICMC: Int.
Computer Music Conf., Copenhagen,
Denmark, August 2007.

• youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=DuuESpj558Y&feature=related

sonic browser

• hugely influential interface

• introduced aurally exploring a
map of sounds

• direct sonification
M. Fernström and E. Brazil. Sonic browsing:
an auditory tool for multimedia asset
management. In Proc. of ICAD ’01:
Internation Conf. on Auditory Display, pages

132–135, Espoo, Finland, August 2001. M.
Fernström and C. McNamara. After direct
manipulation - direct sonification. In Proc. of
ICAD ’98: Int. Conf. on Auditory Display,
1998.

soundtorch

• 3D version of sonic browser
S. Heise, M. Hlatky, and J. Loviscach.
SoundTorch: Quick browsing in large audio
collections. In Proc. of AES 125th Conv., San
Francisco, CA, October 2008.

S. Heise, M. Hlatky, and J. Loviscach. Aurally
and visually enhanced audio search with
SoundTorch. In CHI ’09: Proc. of the 27th int.
conf.e extended abstracts on Human factors
in computing systems, pages 3241–3246,
Boston, MA, USA, April 2009. doi:
10.1145/1520340.1520465.

• youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiwj7Td7Pec

neptune
• based on Islands of Music

P. Knees, M. Schedl, T. Pohle, and G.
Widmer. An innovative three-dimensional
user interface for exploring music
collections enriched with meta-
information from the web. In
MULTIMEDIA ’06: Proc. of the 14th
annual ACM int.l conf. on Multimedia,
pages 17–24, Santa Barbara, CA, USA,
2006. doi: 10.1145/1180639.1180652.

sonixplorer
• extension of neptune

• landscape can be marked up
by user

• introduced focus

• youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIfWg2Eex74

D. Lübbers. Sonixplorer: Combining
visualization and auralization for content-
based exploration of music collections. In
Proc. of ISMIR’05: 6th Int. Society for Music
Information Retrieval Conf., pages 590–593,
London, UK, 2005.

D. Lübbers and M. Jarke. Adaptive
multimodal exploration of music collections.
In Proc. of ISMIR’09: 10th Int. Society for
Music Information Retrieval Conf., pages
195–200, Kyoto, Japan, 2009.

what’s the problem?

• too much information thrown at the user

what’s the problem?

• too much information thrown at the user

• does not translate well to mobile devices

• rendering spatial audio

• reliance on screens

map paradigm without any visuals

evaluation

• user study with 12 users

• most liked the idea

• but the implementation needed improvement

• confusion as to how to navigate through the space

• some people adverse to concurrent playback

add visuals and improve physical controller,
but keep dependence on audio

cyclic playback

• inspired by
S. Ali and P. Aarabi. A cyclic interface for the
presentation of multiple music ﬁles. IEEE
Trans. on Multimedia, 10(5):780–793, August
2008.

• hear everything within 20
seconds

• user can control concurrent
playback

evaluation

• no formal evaluation, but demonstrated to a variety of individuals and small
groups (approximately 40 people)

• improved interaction with physical controller

• perhaps too many controls, much steeper learning curve

• much room for improvement

public installation

• shown in Information Aesthetics at SIGGRAPH 2009

• approximately 1000 passed through the exhibit

• children, students, artists, designers, technologists

• quick to bring smiles - it was fun, people even brought back friends to
experience it

• easy to learn how to use

conclusions drawn from research


• context is key when shaping interaction

• users will approach an interface with previous knowledge, need to build on
and incorporate that knowledge




• audio can’t be subtle

• can’t rely on complex information to be universally implied through only
audio





audio

• can (and should) be fun





audio

• can (and should) be fun

• maps aren’t great, there must be something better

why haven’t these ideas caught on?

why haven’t these ideas caught on?

• solutions use non-scalable algorithms that are impractical for commercial
applications (a problem not limited to only interfaces within MIR)

• music is increasingly in the cloud, looking at entire collections at once is not
useful

• portability across devices

• many of them just don’t work that well
• most have very simple acoustics models
• too much information thrown at user, or information is not organized in an
accessible way

ﬂickr:jlcwalker

ﬂickr:matsber

concentrating on how a small collection of songs
can be best presented to a user

concentrating on how a small collection of songs
can be best presented to a user

i.e. how can the results of a search or browse
query be better presented?

Experimental Design - Aims of Experiment

To determine the best interface parameters for music
search and browsing tasks.

Experimental Design - Independent Variables

Number of Songs:
1 to 5 songs play concurrently


Number of Songs:

Musical and Signal Content of Songs:
Similar or dissimilar.


Number of Songs:

Musical and Signal Content of Songs:
Similar or dissimilar.

Visualization:
Whether interactive graphics representing each
song are presented

Experimental Design - Dependent Variables


Search

• A song is played and the participant needs to ﬁnd that song in the
collection.

• No metadata is displayed.

• The task is timed.


Search

• A song is played and the participant needs to find that song in the
collection.

• No metadata is displayed.


Browse

• A situation is described and the participant is asked to find a song that fits
the situation.


Experimental Design - Participant Experience


1. Participant uses simpliﬁed version of interface with only 1 song to choose
an HRTF set.


an HRTF set.
2. A video explains how to use the interface and the participant has
approximately 5 minutes to practice a search task and a browsing task.


an HRTF set.
3. For about 45 minutes, the participant completes a series of search and
browsing tasks.


an HRTF set.
browsing tasks.
4. The participant completes a short questionnaire about their experience so
far.


an HRTF set.
browsing tasks.
far.
5. 15 minute break away from the computer and headphones.


an HRTF set.
browsing tasks.
far.
6. The participant completes a second 45 minute session of search and
browsing tasks.


an HRTF set.
browsing tasks.
far.
6. The participant completes a second 45 minute session of search and
browsing tasks.
7. The participant completes a ﬁnal questionnaire.

search engines are tuned for the type of
information being sought


but they break down when presenting time-based
media


but they break down when presenting time-based
media

in our case, music

direct manipulation to direct soniﬁcation


listen to the music ﬁrst, then get more information if
so desired


listen to the music ﬁrst, then get more information if
so desired

this is done by using auditory displays

a lot of focus on map-based paradigms, but it is
time to move on

time to move on

concurrent presentation of audio is a good idea

time to move on


but spatialization should not be used to represent
complex relationships

time to move on


but spatialization should not be used to represent
complex relationships

music is complex

incorporating listening improves music search
and discovery

and discovery

so it should continue

and discovery

so it should continue

the work I am doing during my visit at nyu will
measure whether this presented interface can
assist people in performing search and browse
tasks more efﬁciently

however, what I believe to be the most difﬁcult
problem still remains to be addressed:

the cold start problem

future work needs to concentrate on how you
initiate a search or browsing task

thank you

these slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/beckystewart/presentations

Listen to Music Search with Auditory Display Interfaces

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