Categories of Music Description and Search Terms and Phrases Used by Non-Music Experts

Previous research has demonstrated that people listen to music for various reasons. The purpose of this study was to investigate people’s perception of music, and thus their music information needs. These ideas were examined by presenting 22 participants with 7 classical musical pieces, asking one-half of them to write words descriptive of each piece, and the other half words they would use if searching for each piece. All the words used by all subjects in both tasks were classified into 7 categories. The two most frequently appearing categories were emotions and occasions or filmed events regardless of the task type. These subjects, none of whom had formal training in music, almost never used words related to formal features of music, rather using words indicating other features, most of which have not been considered in existing or proposed music IR systems. These results suggest that music IR research should be extended to consider needs other than finding known items, or items identified by formal characteristics, and that understanding music information needs of users should be prioritized to design more sophisticated music IR systems.