Music Serendipity
Class Project in Media Interaction Design, KAIST
Concept
People's musical tastes reflect their personalities. Thus, when a person meets someone with similar taste in music, they connect with each other in a moment of serendipity. Today in the digital era, people reveal their musical tastes through mobile devices in which music is mainly kept in the form of files. In this regard, Music Serendipity visualizes how musical tastes are related between two persons by comparing the music information in their mobile devices.
Method
Music Serendipity has three steps; pairing, retrieving, and visualizing.
Using Bluetooth communication, Music Serendipity applications in two devices connect with each other with user permissions and exchange the information of music files within each device. Then, similarity information among artists is retrieved from the database of Last.fm, an online music service, through its OpenAPI. A similarity value is represented as a floating number between 0 (i.e. not similar) and 1 (i.e. very similar).
While retrieving the similarity information, a visualization process works simultaneously. Each artist in devices is expressed as a small circle on screens. Only artists in each device are showed on each screen, and a curved line between two circles means the similarity between two artists. The thickness and saturation of a line vary depending upon a similarity value. For instance, the thicker the line is, the higher the similarity is. The main colors of these lines are red, blue, and violet; a red or blue line has two end nodes in the same device, and a violet line crosses the two devices. During the visualization process, users can see all visual changes in real time.
Result
Through circles on each screen, users easily noticed and compared how many artists exist in each device. Also, red lines or blue lines indicated how many artists in the same device are similar and related with each other. By seeing violet lines between two devices and comparing how many artists in the two devices are similar, users were able to discover the similarity in musical tastes to some extent.
Users were also able to interact with the visualization results due to following the interaction design: Dragging a circle changes its position and the shapes of lines that are connected to the circle in real time. By double tapping on a circle, the circle changes into a round-edged rectangle, and its artist's name is displayed inside. If users tap the artist name in the rectangle, the list of the artist's songs that exist in the device appears on the screen, and users can listen to a selected song in the list.
Conclusion
In an era of digital music, Music Serendipity gives people a new way to explore their musical tastes intuitively and find new music and artists by comparing with others' tastes interactively. Also, the visualization idea makes a pleasant experience by connecting and synchronizing two screens as if these are of one device.
However, due to the limitation of a screen size and the unpredictable number of artists in devices, better ways should be considered to visualize artists not as just randomly scattered circles, such as zooming in and out the screen or visualizing as three-dimensional space. Its color scheme also can be modified to improve the beauty and visibility of visualization results.
Class Project in Media Interaction Design, KAIST
Concept
People's musical tastes reflect their personalities. Thus, when a person meets someone with similar taste in music, they connect with each other in a moment of serendipity. Today in the digital era, people reveal their musical tastes through mobile devices in which music is mainly kept in the form of files. In this regard, Music Serendipity visualizes how musical tastes are related between two persons by comparing the music information in their mobile devices.
Method
Music Serendipity has three steps; pairing, retrieving, and visualizing.
Using Bluetooth communication, Music Serendipity applications in two devices connect with each other with user permissions and exchange the information of music files within each device. Then, similarity information among artists is retrieved from the database of Last.fm, an online music service, through its OpenAPI. A similarity value is represented as a floating number between 0 (i.e. not similar) and 1 (i.e. very similar).
While retrieving the similarity information, a visualization process works simultaneously. Each artist in devices is expressed as a small circle on screens. Only artists in each device are showed on each screen, and a curved line between two circles means the similarity between two artists. The thickness and saturation of a line vary depending upon a similarity value. For instance, the thicker the line is, the higher the similarity is. The main colors of these lines are red, blue, and violet; a red or blue line has two end nodes in the same device, and a violet line crosses the two devices. During the visualization process, users can see all visual changes in real time.
Result
Through circles on each screen, users easily noticed and compared how many artists exist in each device. Also, red lines or blue lines indicated how many artists in the same device are similar and related with each other. By seeing violet lines between two devices and comparing how many artists in the two devices are similar, users were able to discover the similarity in musical tastes to some extent.
Users were also able to interact with the visualization results due to following the interaction design: Dragging a circle changes its position and the shapes of lines that are connected to the circle in real time. By double tapping on a circle, the circle changes into a round-edged rectangle, and its artist's name is displayed inside. If users tap the artist name in the rectangle, the list of the artist's songs that exist in the device appears on the screen, and users can listen to a selected song in the list.
Conclusion
In an era of digital music, Music Serendipity gives people a new way to explore their musical tastes intuitively and find new music and artists by comparing with others' tastes interactively. Also, the visualization idea makes a pleasant experience by connecting and synchronizing two screens as if these are of one device.
However, due to the limitation of a screen size and the unpredictable number of artists in devices, better ways should be considered to visualize artists not as just randomly scattered circles, such as zooming in and out the screen or visualizing as three-dimensional space. Its color scheme also can be modified to improve the beauty and visibility of visualization results.