Metalheads dress in black… and so does your music collection!
Everybody knows that metalheads like to dress in black, but what is the color of New Age music? Or how does fast jazz music look like? In his dissertation Jukka Holm explores the feasibility of visualizing music collections based on musical metadata, such as musical genres.“When designed in an intuitive manner, using avatars and other entertaining visualizations can be an interesting way to differentiate from the other digital music services on the market,” says Jukka Holm.
Modern digital music services and applications enable easy access to vast online and local music collections. As making the content available to users is no longer an issue, the emphasis is now moving more and more to inventing new service concepts and improving the user experience of existing products. One potential way to separate from the competitors is to replace or complement textual lists with aesthetic visualizations of selected musical attributes. A well-designed visualization has the potential to make interaction with a service or an application an entertaining and intuitive experience, and it can also improve the usability and efficiency of the system.
In his dissertation, Jukka Holm has studied which visual attributes are best suitable for representing three types of musical metadata - musical genre, tempo and the release year of the music – and what is their performance from the user perspective. Furthermore, Holm has studied how the genre visualizations can be used in the design of novel graphical user interfaces for music player applications, and which visualization techniques are acceptable to the end users. In addition to presenting data collected from 543 survey participants, Holm describes three novel visual user interfaces for a music recommendation system developed at Nokia Research Center.
Public defence of a doctoral dissertation on Friday, 5 October
The doctoral dissertation of MSc Jukka Holm in the field of human-centered technology "Visualizing music collections based on metadata: Concepts, user studies and design implications" will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in room TB109 in the Tietotalo building (Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere, Finland) on Friday, 5 October 2012 at 12.00.
The opponents will be Professor Emeritus Yngve Sundblad (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and Professor Petri Toiviainen (University of Jyväskylä). Professor Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila from TUT’s Department of Software Systems will act as Chairman.
Jukka Holm (39) comes from Tampere and works at the moment as an independent inventor and artist.
Further information: Jukka Holm, +358 44 2008646, jukka.holm@tut.fi
The dissertation is available at http://URN.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-15-2908-5.