Music Listening in the Future: Augmented Music-Understanding Interfaces and Crowd Music Listening

In the future, music listening can be more active, more immersive, richer, and deeper by using automatic music-understanding technologies (semantic audio analysis). In the first half of this invited talk, four Augmented Music-Understanding Interfaces that facilitate deeper understanding of music are introduced. In our interfaces, visualization of music content and music touch-up (customization) play important roles in augmenting people’s understanding of music because understanding is deepened through seeing and editing. In the second half, a new style of music listening called Crowd Music Listening is discussed. By posting, sharing, and watching time-synchronous comments (semantic information), listeners can enjoy music together with the crowd. Such Internet-based music listening with shared semantic information also helps music understanding because understanding is deepened through communication. Two systems that deal with new trends in music listening — time-synchronous comments and mashup music videos — are finally introduced.