Synopsis

Music plays a significant role in creating a mood for parties and small get-togethers. Just how music is an interplay of various instruments in harmony, it too can involve a sense of harmony amongst users. This sense of harmony, however, is hardly reflected in the current music control interfaces.

Services like Spotify have an internal log of all songs streamed - and even skipped - by the user. These enormous amounts of user data are needed to power the artificial intelligence-based recommendation systems in use by virtually all big content providers. This data, unfortunately, rarely gets used in user interfaces Within this research, we aim to use this data create a socially translucent shared music listening experience. Social Translucence is a model for collaboration that focuses on the principles of visibility, awareness, and shared accountability. We therefore ask the question:

‘What are the effects of Social Translucency in the context of shared music listening?’

Through a field deployment of a social context display, participants were presented with each other’s estimated enjoyment of the music played during the listening session. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to discover the changes in social dynamics as a result of the social context display.

Reflection

This project was one of my favorites I have done. Especially because the results of the test were somewhat unexpected. The test set out to create a fairer music listening experience for groups. While this worked, the concept proved to be more potent as a conversation starter. Participants were stoked to see when someone else also listened to a song a lot. It has highlighted the social potency of music, and played a key role in forming what would become Rootnote and Dynamix.