Strands Blog

Those intrigued by the growing trend of visualization techniques, will be interested in the responses of Justin Donaldson to a questionnaire received from the British publication Five Eight magazine. Justin is a MyStrands’ researcher, Indiana University PhD Candidate, author of the Artist Network Visualization and the Maps of Recommendations, and 1st place Award Winner in Netsci06:

1. Explain briefly the outline of your service and what it hopes to achieve.
The Artistnet Interactive Visualization (see video) generates a network model from our user’s play activity. This is a very similar process to what we do “behind the scenes” with our recommender engine, although on a much, much smaller scale. However, even in this limited version you can often see how individuals relate to each other through their shared music tastes. The network visualization makes this apparent when two people’s “strands” of artists become connected. Most likely, those two people have something in common with their musical tastes, and may find something new and interesting in each other’s recent music listening history.

2. What do you think music visualization services bring to the table over other recommendation services?
Music visualization services represent recommendation information in a much higher level of detail. They expose recommendation as a “field of possibilities” instead of a simple ordinal list of results. Other MyStrands visualizations (such as recommendation mapping) seek to do just this. Exposing the relationships between the artists, songs, or albums in this fashion can help an individual come to a better understanding of how the artists, songs, and albums relate to one another in a broader cultural sense.

3. How are they of benefit to consumers and music users?
They benefit consumers and music users in the sense that they offer a richer portrait of the music possibilities available at any given time. People that are passionate about music are then able to explore their options in a more involved way.

4. How important are visuals to users experience of music in an age where cover art has been cast aside in the digital realm?
Cover art is not “completely” dead. It is experiencing a rebirth of sorts in the form of small thumbnail images (such as the “coverflow” visualization in iTunes). There is no doubt in my mind that the resolution and multimedia aspects of “album art” will continue to increase well beyond its current primitive state, and will once again become a significant component to a musical offering. With high definition televisions and sound systems at reasonable prices, the time is ripe for a multimedia “convergence” of sorts which will most likely kick off with music. In a sense, this is already happening with music videos. In fact, the most popular videos right now on youtube are often music videos, and MyStrands has just started providing recommendation for these videos with MyStrands.TV.

5. Where do you see these kind of services going in the future?
I think we as consumers will have a heightened awareness of our digital entertainment options. Eventually, recommendation service users will split into two camps: Those who want “push” recommendation, similar to conventional advertising where options are provided to them in a straightforward manner; and those who want “pull” recommendations, where an individual can explore the world of media possibilities relevant to them, and eventually play an active role in spreading new media that they enjoy. This sort of behavior already exists through informal social interaction (“Hey, did you hear about this new band?”…etc). However, recommendation systems will seek to automate and optimize it for everyone: listeners, artists, labels, studios, and venues. It’s gonna rock.