TOWARDS A SOCIO-CULTURAL COMPATIBILITY OF MIR SYSTEMS Stephan Baumann Tim Pohle Vembu Shankar German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Erwin Schrödinger Str. 67663 Kaiserslautern Germany German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence Erwin Schrödinger Str. 67663 Kaiserslautern Germany Technical University of Hamburg 21071 Hamburg Germany ABSTRACT Future MIR systems will be of great use and pleasure for potential users. If researchers have a clear picture about their “customers” in mind they can aim at building and evaluating their systems exactly inside the different socio-cultural environments of such music listeners. Since music is in most cases embedded into a socio-cultural process we propose especially to evaluate MIR applications outside the lab during daily activities. For this purpose we designed a mobile music recommendation system relying on a trimodal music similarity metric, which allows for subjective on-the-fly adjustments of recommendations. It offers online access to large-scale metadata repositories as well as an audio database containing 1000 songs. We did first small- scale evaluations of this approach and came to interesting results regarding the perception of song similarity concerning the relations between sound, cultural issues and lyrics. Our paper will also give insights to the three different underlying approaches for song similarity computation (sound, cultural issues, lyrics), focusing in detail on a novel clustering of album reviews as found at online music retailers. Keywords: Socio-cultural issues in MIR, multimodal song similarity, ecological validation. 1. INTRODUCTION We propose a socio-cultural compatibility of MIR systems and achieved promising results by evaluating such an application in the field of mobile music recommendations. We included the following aspects: 1. The musical work of artists is examined from the perspective of a music-consuming society. 2. Optionally, users may add personal information about age, gender, musical education, personal taste which reflects belonging to social peer groups. 3. Subjective music-listening behavior in socio- cultural environments is collected and evaluated with an ecological approach. 4. Long-term observations are undertaken using a plugin for Winamp MP3 software. 5. Aspects of the artist’s creative intention being partially represented in sound, orchestration, production environment, selection of singer and lyrics are covered by audio analysis and information retrieval methods. We are well aware of the fact that such a holistic approach needs for a significant amount of research. Nevertheless other authors [1] have proposed similar approaches emphasizing the socio-cultural dimension. Our activities and the presented paper focus on the aspects (1) and (3) (in contrast to our previous publication [2] which included no details about the clustering techniques). Point (5) is described very shallow and (2), (4) are considered in future work. Figure 1. Ecological evaluation. 2. RELATED WORK Our research asks how we might add to our understanding of perception of music similarity through an ‘ecological’ approach. This means studying how people perceive music similarity in their normal lives beyond the artificial world of lab-based experiments. To this end we want to find new ways of observing users’ interaction with our systems as they go about their everyday activities. Cognition in the wild means studying cognitive phenomena in the natural contexts in which they occur. This approach relates to the insight that what people do in labs may not be ‘ecologically valid’: experimental results may be artefacts of the lab situation, failing to represent people’s behaviour in the ‘ecologies’ of their normal lives. While the lab-based approach can tell us about perception of music similarity [3], we feel it is also important to look beyond the lab and its artificial experimental setups, to music users’ spontaneous perception of music similarity in real situations as part of their everyday lives. This ecological approach might reveal, for example, how perception changes with time, location, or activity, in ways, which Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. © 2004 Universitat Pompeu Fabra.