Interactive Music Genre Exploration with Visualization and Mood Control

Recommender systems can be used to help users discover novel items and explore new tastes, for example in music genre exploration. However, little work has studied how to improve users' understandability and acceptance of the novel items as well as support users to explore a new domain. In this paper, we investigate how two different visualizations and mood control influence the perceived control, informativeness and understandability of a music genre exploration tool, and further to improve the helpfulness for new music genre exploration. Specifically, we compare a bar chart visualization used by earlier work to a contour plot which allows users to compare their musical preferences with both the recommended tracks as well as the new genre. Mood control is implemented with two sliders to set a preferred mood on energy and valence features (that correlate with psychological mood dimensions). In the online user study, mood control was manipulated between subjects, and the visualizations were compared within subjects. During the study (N=102), we measured users' subjective perceptions, experiences and the interactions with the system. Our results show that the contour plot visualization is perceived more helpful to explore new genres than the bar chart visualization, as the contour plot is perceived to be more informative and understandable. Users spent significantly more time and used the mood control more in the contour plot than in the bar chart visualization. Overall, our results show that the contour plot visualization combined with mood control serves as the most helpful way for new music genre exploration, because the mood control is easier to understand and use when made transparent via an informative visualization.