Conversations with Expert Users in Music Retrieval and Research Challenges for Creative MIR

Sample retrieval remains a central problem in the creative process of making electronic dance music. This paper describes the findings from a series of interview sessions involving users working creatively with electronic music. We conducted in-depth interviews with expert users on location at the Red Bull Music Academies in 2014 and 2015. When asked about their wishes and expectations for future technological developments in interfaces, most participants mentioned very practical requirements of storing and retrieving files. A central aspect of the desired systems is the need to provide increased flow and unbroken periods of concentration and creativity. From the interviews, it becomes clear that for Creative MIR, and in particular, for music interfaces for creative expression, traditional requirements and paradigms for music and audio retrieval differ to those from consumer-centered MIR tasks such as playlist generation and recommendation and that new paradigms need to be considered. Despite all technical aspects being controllable by the experts themselves, searching for sounds to use in composition remains a largely semantic process. From the outcomes of the interviews, we outline a series of possible conclusions and areas and pose two research challenges for future developments of sample retrieval interfaces in the creative domain. 1. MOTIVATION AND CONTEXT Considerable effort has been put into analysing user behaviour in the context of music retrieval in the past two decades [35]. This includes studies on music information seeking behaviour [14,17], organisation strategies [15], usage of commercial listening services [36], the needs or motivations of particular users, such as kids [28], adolescents [34], or musicologists [29], and behaviour analysis for specific tasks, e.g., playlist and mix generation [13], or in specific settings, e.g., riding together in a car [16] or in music lessons in secondary schools [49]. c © Kristina Andersen, Peter Knees. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: Kristina Andersen, Peter Knees. “Conversations with Expert Users in Music Retrieval and Research Challenges for Creative MIR”, 17th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 2016. Figure 1. Live electronic music performance at the Red Bull Music Academy 2014 In this paper, we want to address music retrieval from the perspective of music producers, thus investigate the user behaviour of a group that deals with audio retrieval professionally on a daily basis, but has received comparatively less attention in MIR research so far—as have other questions from the area of Creative MIR [27]. The majority of today’s electronic music is created from pre-recorded or live-generated sound material. This process often combines sound loops and samples with synthesized and processed elements using a so-called digital audio workstation (DAW), an electronic device or computer application for recording, editing and producing audio files. In these systems, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) methods, e.g., for content analysis, gain importance. In essence, future tools and applications need to be aware of the nature and content of the music material, in order to effectively support the musician in the creative process. However, user studies on retrieval for musicians and producers are scarce. Cartwright et al. [6] investigate potential alternatives to existing audio production user interfaces in a study with 24 participants. In another example, Bainbridge et al. [4] explore and test a personal digital library environment for musicians, where based on a spatial paradigm musicians should be able to capture, annotate, and retrieve their ideas, e.g., using query-by-humming. In this paper, our approach is not to test an existing system, but to gain an understanding of the processes involved for music producers, who are used to working with existing music software suites.