Spectralmind und Gracenote: Musikauswahl nach Stimmung

Mit Prototyp einer Spotify-App zeigen die beiden Unternehmen auf der ISMIR die Zukunft der Navigation durch digitale Musiksammlungen

Porto/Wien/Emeryville, 8. Oktober 2012. Spectralmind (http://www.spectralmind.com) und Gracenote (www.gracenote.com) geben auf der 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) in Porto, Portugal, einen Einblick, wie wir in Zukunft digitale Musik auswählen und hören könnten. Die beiden Unternehmen zeigen eine Demo-App für den Spotify-Player, der Musik für jeden Anwender personalisiert nach Stimmung und Geschmack darstellt. Die Navigation erfolgt intuitiv durch grafische Darstellung auf mehreren Ebenen – Listendarstellungen sind damit passé. Im zusätzlich verfügbaren „Discovery Mode“ der App wird der Musikkonsument auf eine Musikentdeckungsreise geschickt. Er bekommt nicht nur bereits bekannte Lieder zu hören, sondern Musik aus einem 18 Millionen Titel umfassenden Katalog vorgeschlagen – alles abgestimmt auf seinen individuellen Geschmack und seine Stimmung. Spectralmind macht mit der nun gezeigten Demo-App für Spotify nach einer Reihe von unter dem Brand „Sonarflow“ veröffentlichten Musik-Apps für iOS erstmals eine App für Notebook- und Desktop-Rechner.

Wenn Gracenote, Sony-Tochterunternehmen und weltgrößter Anbieter von Musik-Metadaten, und Spectralmind, führender Anbieter intuitiv-grafischer Medieninterfaces, zusammenarbeiten, bekommt man einen Einblick in die (nahe) Zukunft des Musikkonsums. Starre, willkürliche und in Listen gezwängte Musikeinteilung gehört der Vergangenheit an. Stattdessen wird die Musiksammlung des Nutzers mittels Software intelligent interpretiert und in persönliche, individuell gestaltete Bereiche gegliedert, die auf den emotionalen Musikhören viel näherliegenden Ebenen „Gefühl“ und „Stimmung“ basieren.

Die individualisierten Bezeichnungen der Musik-„Bubbles“ werden durch einen Algorithmus gebildet. Sie sind immer leicht verständlich sowie semantisch präzise und sinnvoll. Musik-Bubbles könnten beispielsweise als „Energetic Anxious Indie Dance“ oder „Arousing Groove Hip-Hop/Rap by male artist“ heißen. Die Interpretation der Stile ist sehr exakt und erfolgt auf Song-Ebene. Damit wird den unterschiedlichen Stilen einzelner Künstler Rechnung getragen – sie werden nicht pauschal in einen Stil-„Topf“ geworfen.

Die nach Stimmung angeordnete Musik wird nicht in Listen, sondern in verschiedenfarbigen Blasen, den „Bubbles“, dargestellt. Diese bestehen aus mehreren Ebenen, in die sich der Nutzer durch stufenloses Zoomen vertiefen kann. Auf jeder Ebene findet er mehr Information und immer weiter verfeinerte Musik-Empfehlungen – jeweils immer auf Basis der initial gewünschten Musikstimmung. Die Songs können natürlich auf jeder Ebene im Player abgespielt werden.

Musikreise im „Discovery Mode“

Aktiviert der Nutzer den „Entdeckungs“-Modus, den Discovery Mode der App, begibt er sich auf eine Musikentdeckungsreise auf Basis seiner favorisierten Musik-Empfindung. Dabei holt die App Musik aus dem Millionen von Titeln umfassenden Spotify-Katalog – ein beinahe unerschöpfliches Reservoire an neuer, vom Hörer bisher unentdeckter Musik.

„Die bunten Bubbles, die auf jeder Ebene immer mehr Details eröffnen, sind perfekt für die Auswahl von Musik nach Gefühl und Stimmung geeignet“, sagt Thomas Lidy, CEO von Spectralmind. „Durch die visuell ansprechende Darstellung wird der Umgang mit Musik wieder emotionaler, intuitiver, spielerischer – wir bieten damit einen völlig ungekannten Zugang zum Musikhören und -entdecken. Die bekannten Listendarstellungen sind im Zeitalter von Touch-Screens und Musik aus der Cloud anachronistisch.“

Gracenote liefert dabei die dahinterstehende Technologie zur Gruppierung von Musik nach Stimmungen und Geschmäckern.

Anmerkung: Bei der von Spectralmind und Gracenote auf der ISMIR gezeigten Spotify-App handelt es sich um einen funktionierenden Prototypen, der einen Einblick in die aktuellen technischen und visuellen Möglichkeiten des Musikkonsums gibt. Wann die Anwendung verfügbar sein wird, ist derzeit noch offen.

About Spectralmind:

Spectralmind is a technology leader in the field of media intelligence. Spectralmind offers fully fledged media discovery solutions in both consumer and professional markets. The solution stands out by its unique combination of intuitive visual interfaces and advanced content discovery technologies to provide the latest in media discovery and content recommendation. The company’s proprietary audio matching engine is capable of suggesting similar music titles based on a song’s acoustic content and a user’s preferences. The technology is used for media discovery in a wide range of domains, such as music and video portals, smartphone and tablet apps and professional media solutions.

The company’s vision is to revolutionize the media discovery space through its unique combination of intelligent content discovery and visual user experience.

About Gracenote

A pioneer in digital media, Gracenote, Inc. provides music and video content and technologies to the world’s hottest entertainment products and brands. The company’s partners in the entertainment community include major music publishers and labels, prominent independents and movie studios and television networks. A wholly owned, independent subsidiary of the Sony Corporation of America (SCA), Gracenote has offices in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Seoul, and Taipei with worldwide headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, follow us at @GracenoteTweets and www.facebook.com/PoweredbyGracenote.

Spectralmind im Internet: http://www.spectralmind.com/

Sonarflow App: http://www.sonarflow.com

Sonarflow auf Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Sonarflow

Ansprechpartner für redaktionelle Rückfragen:

i5comm für Spectralmind

Bernhard Lehner

Tel.: +43 664 439 86 09
E-Mail: sonarflow [at] i5comm.com

For customers, such masses of content are a like a huge, impenetrable jungle, which they hardly enter, or, if they dare, causes them a lot of effort to get around. Consumers restrict themselves to take note only of the freshest plants growing at the very edge of this jungle and, probably, a few of the old but bigger-than-the-rest landmark trees. Distributors know for long, that the increment of tracks made available not automatically translates into an increment of tracks sold.

Personally, I´m not much interested to see duplicates of the same recording released through endless numbers of compilations, re-issues or samplers. I find it a pain, to scroll through more of the same while discovering music. As a serious music listener (and buyer), a main driver of my personal music discovery and purchasing behavior is musical context: the stories behind a recording, the circumstances that influenced an artist to create or perform a piece. The particular era, which shaped an artist or which was shaped by an artist, whether it was italian Renaissance or 1970s hip-hop from the Bronx.
Unfortunately, contextual information in online music distribution seems to be largely neglected. At least, a few basics are in place:

Album art:

Most online music stores display album art. Probably used rather as colorful elements to break-up boring listings of tracks than intended to convey context. Album art are the photographs or graphical designs originally applied to the packaging of a physical sound recording. Why is this contextual information? The imagery on vinyl discs or CDs quite often relates directly to the conceptual idea behind the music. Album title, album art and the music in its particular sequence are a holistic synthesis of artistic expression. Much of this synthesis gets lost in online stores: e.g. customers see only the front cover, but never the back cover or the inside artwork. As well, the purchase of entire albums is on the wane, replaced by the cherry-picking of individual tracks.

Artist info and song lyrics:

What´s often lost as well is the gist of information related to the who, when, how etc. of a recording. This makes it very difficult to figure out the real recording date and place or the line-up of musicians in a particular performance. Some online stores present more or less accurate articles about artists or albums. These articles are helpful, but quite often I perceive them as isolated fragments of information, and, much worse, entirely unaffected by the principle blessing of the online age: the hyperlink. Extensive hyperlinking of artist- or album-related articles in online stores would represent a powerful driver of music discovery. Information of that kind is available online, but it resides in distinct, unrelated online silos. Same is the case with song lyrics.

Artist videos:

At least since the days of MTV we know about the importance of video for music. Music videos make YouTube probably the most frequented music destination site of the planet. Yet, the combined, well integrated display of artist videos next to the audio offering in online music stores is rarely to be found.

I guess, online stores still mimic to a large extent their physical predecessors. Only that online stores have a confusingly sized inventory on offer, but no helpful shopkeepers, capable to support shoppers with knowledgeable and supportive information. Online stores have not fully grasped the fact, that they could be more than marketplaces. Like physical malls, they could provide convenient and pleasurable, probably playful discovery experiences, which would turn out as stickiness attributes, purchase drivers, differentiators and reasons to come back. Deeper integration of contextual information, provided through carefully curated linkage and referencing of text, lyrics, videos, images and album art, should be the way to go.

Already in the days of the ringtone craze, music distributors thought of methods to improve the content exploration experience on small screens, hoping to create a discovery convenience that ultimately adds to the stickiness of the mobile storefront and that stimulates higher consumption. Since then, a flurry of content discovery approaches have been put in place.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the main discovery methods:

• In the beginning was the browsing portal. Drop-off rates of more than 50% per menu level, even in popularity-based menu structures invalidated this model. The battle for main page presence was decided shortly after in favor of access categories like “new” (aka “novelties” or “latest additions”),  ”most wanted” (aka “charts”) combined with the display of lists of noteworthy, editorially selected albums or tracks.

• Personalized storefronts. The idea is to rearrange a mobile storefront according to a user’s previous browsing history, assuming that the historic session would be indicative of the user’s preferences. Users appreciate personalization, but want popular content at other times.

• Discovery through search. Valid idea, but only if the user knows exactly what to search for.

• Recommendation engines. An attempt to infer a user’s music preference algorithmically from his/her past purchases, followed by suggestions of music bought by other users with similar preferences. Alternatively, recommendations are derived from human classification of content as the basis for the suggestion of matching titles. Such recommender systems have a permanent place in today’s music storefronts.

• Social sharing and communities. This idea picks up the concept of “following” (another user and his/her purchases or music plays) or the sharing of playlists and their proliferation through social networks.

What we find in today’s music stores is a best-of-breed combination of all of the above. These are tried and tested methods. Still, we believe music discovery needs an innovative push. Music services are increasingly similar. They offer more or less the same content at the same price. They even look similar in terms of their user interfaces and they provide comparable user experiences. In short: music distribution needs differentiators to avoid commoditization.

Here at Spectralmind, we believe in data visualization as the new frontier of music discovery. Data visualization is an art, which attempts to turn even very big data sets into visual patterns, structures and elements, in order to make the data readable and understandable. There is no doubt that music represents an enormous body of data. The leading digital music distributors pride themselves on managing catalog sizes in the range of 15-20 million tracks. Visualization methods can repackage such volumes into easily accessible formats.

Our approach goes beyond the static visualization of data. In sonarflow, our visual music browser, graphical catalog visualization is the interface to navigate, operate and explore vast arrays of musical content and to expose music recommendations in a spacial and gestural environment.

This interface is capable of embracing core user needs for content discovery:

• browsing through large stocks of content in an intuitive and seamless way

• discovery through serendipitous expedition, ready to encounter music of unexpected relevance

• personalization through playlist creation

• social sharing

So hey, if you are in music distribution, don’t fall into the commodity trap. Get in touch, we would love to show you our approach.