Collaborative Music Consumption through Mobile Devices

The immersive growth of digitally available audio files calls for novel forms of interaction and consumption. There are many different approaches how to navigate and organize audio collections, but most of them do not offer much more than some kind of scrolling through lists, sometimes fancier, often not. A novel form of playlist creation is possible through Music Maps, which provide a interactive and intuitive interface to large music collections by creating a musical space where playlists are created by selecting regions on a map or by drawing trajectories on a map. This thesis discusses this theme from different points of view: The Path-Metaphor of playlists on Music Spaces will be investigated to identify strengths and weaknesses of the underlying techniques used to create the above mentioned Music Maps. To achieve this, user generated playlists will be compared to playlists created with the metaphor and outstanding differences and common properties are calculated. This analysis is then used to identify the weaknesses of the Path-Metaphor. The information gained in this analysis process will further help to understand how, and based on which principles, human users create playlists. This will again help to improve the quality of automated created playlist. Based on the Path-Metaphor, different approaches to enable Collaborative Music Consumption will be presented. Suggestions and requests from different users have to be considered when creating a collaborative playlist. There are many ways how to do this – some of them will be presented with their pros and cons. To bring these, so far theoretical, concepts onto a practical basis, a prototype application for portable devices is then presented. This application will allow to use Music Maps on mobile devices by individual users and, to add the cooperative and multi-user aspect, provide different approaches of Collaborative Music Consumption. The results of the so far mentioned work enables manifold scenarios of new ways of music consumption. Not only the collaborative and multi-user aspect opens new applications, but also the ubiquitous usage of musical spaces is a promising area. The combination of real and virtual musical spaces can be further propagated by including mobile clients which allow to quickly switch from the one setting to the other.