Engaging with Mobile Music Retrieval, 2015

Authors: Daniel Boland, Roderick Murray-Smith, Ross Mclachland
Type: Conference paper
Conference: mobileHCI
Title: mobileHCI
Year: 2015

Abstract: This paper contributes novel measures of user engagement in mobile music retrieval, linking these to work in music psychology, and illustrating resulting design guidelines in a demonstrator system. The large music collections available to users today can be overwhelming in mobile settings, they offer ‘too-much-choice’ to users, who often resort to shuffle-based playback. Work in music psychology has introduced the concept of music engagement — listeners vary in their desired control over their music listening, and engagement varies with listening context. We develop a series of metrics to capture music listening behaviour from users’ interaction logs. In a survey of 94 music listeners, we show significant correlations between music engagement from questionnaires and the presented quantitative metrics. We show how music retrieval can adapt to this engagement, developing a tablet-based demonstrator system, with an exploratory evaluation.

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