Music Organisation Using Colour Synaesthesia

Michael Voong and Russell Beale
University of Birmingham, UK
www.colourplayer.com
Music Organisation Using Colour Synaesthesia

When you think of Tuesday, do you think of Orange?

The Problem “ the music player should learn my music taste and help me select the right music for the moment. Something fresh in the morning, something smooth in the evening...”

Doing this in iTunes

Primary Method: Playlists
Cumbersome process
Opinions of what goes in changes over time
Sometimes text not a great descriptor
Boundaries of genres blur

User Study
Aims
Find out current usage behaviours
Explore possibilities of other descriptors

Age Groups
Main age group 17-30 years

Collection Sizes
Typically very large music collections

Number of Different Genres
Diverse music collections

Choice of Media Player

Playback Method
Selection methods most popular
Users still want choice

A Tagging Methodology
Tag music according to emotional response
Use response indirectly as a filtering mechanism
+

Workflow: Tagging Music User Listens to Synaesthesia Tag Applied Colour Association

Strong/Weak Synaesthesia
Experience of perceiving in one sense when another is stimulated
e.g. involuntary perception of colour when hearing sounds
Rare to experience strong synaesthesia
e.g. Grapheme -> color synesthesia
Most people experience weak synaesthesia
e.g. Colour from timbre or key
Some consistent trends: e.g. higher pitched sounds -> brighter colours

Experiment
57 users
No demographical information (deliberate)
Discrete choice of ten colours:
Task: associate five tracks with colours

Colour Meaning Theory
Not proven, but generally accepted in western world
Special cultural colours
e.g. trust and stability
Americans: generally blue
Koreans: pink and other pastel colours
Source: http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm

“Feels Like It Should”

What Does This Mean? Orange: Sunshine, enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, stimulation Purple: Ambition, wisdom, creativity and magic. a very artificial colour

“Killing Time”

Red: Energy, danger, courage, power, passion and desire Black: Power, elegance, death, evil and mystery

“This Love”

Red-orange: Pleasure , aggression , action Light Red: Joy, sensitivity and love

Comments “ For 2 of the songs a colour came straight away and it was quite clear”

“ I'm always happy when I have a good DJ, who plays songs that I like at this moment... So, choosing songs of 'similar colour' could be helpful...”

“ I only use playlists excessively because itunes doesn't have a good enough inbuilt way of organising my music by mood”

“ i think that there may be a problem with the user being inconsistent with how they associate their music with colours, especially if you consider that they'll be doing this over the lifetime of the application ”

“ I love the idea. But if this is the only means to play music then it may be too restrictive.”

“ ...I strongly believe that there is no intrinsic property in music that suggests color. This would be subjective and change even for a given person from situation to situation. Any association of color is external to the music itself...”

Movements and Colour “ suites of classical music often consist of movements of varying 'colour' - one peaceful movement, one dramatic one, etc. For an example listen to the New World Symphony by Dvorak.”

Performance: Merging Playlists Secs Subject

General Performance
Colour Player: only 16% slower to assign colour than assign playlist
Neither hard not easy (mean = 3.11, s.d = 1.05) to associate colours with music

Reasons for Colour Selection

Association Patterns
Two dimensional self-organising map
No clear patterns seen
Future work to mine larger dataset

Questions? Michael Voong and Russell BealeUniversity of Birmingham, UK www.colourplayer.com

Music Organisation Using Colour Synaesthesia

by m.voong on May 03, 2007

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Music Organisation Using Colour Synaesthesia — Presentation Transcript