Listener-Centered Data Sources and Aspects: Traces of Music Interaction

Abstract

While Chaps. 5 and 6 addressed contextual factors of the music items themselves, this chapter targets the interaction between users and music items. We first describe how respective data can be organized in terms of abstraction level. Subsequently, we detail data acquisition from social networks, ratings, playlists, listening histories, and others. Furthermore, aspects of the user context are discussed, including the listener’s location and activity as well as time and weather, which are typically acquired through sensor data from smart phones and web services, respectively. Users’ connections in social networks are also discussed in this context. We round off the chapter by analyzing some factors of user intention when listening to music. How the discussed interaction traces and aspects of the user context and user intention can be exploited for music similarity and music recommendation is the topic of Chap. 8