Singing with Data

Description

Can we use recommender technologies to help people to acquire new (music) preferences? We took that challenge again during the Den Bosch Dataweek. In 2018, we tuned a concert program of an opera singer to the Spotify profiles of the audience. This year, we invited two choirs. One choir (Pop-soul choir Rosmalen) with a repertoire of mostly popular music and one choir (Strijps Kamerkoor), a classical chamber choir. We tuned the program to the musical profiles of the audience, but also shaped the program in such a way, that we could predict for each visitor which song of each pair of songs performed by the choirs they would like most. We provided the visitors with an app to measure and show their preferences and test whether our predictions were correct. In this blog we discuss the setup and results, showing that we can indeed predict, to some extent, what songs our visitors would like best during a live concert based on their spotify profiles.