Michael Voong and Russell BealeUniversity of Birmingham, UKwww.colourplayer.com

Music Organisation Using Colour Synaesthesia

When you think of Tuesday, do you think of

Orange?

“the music player should learn my music taste and help me select the right music for the moment. Something fresh in the morning,

something smooth in the evening...”

The Problem

Doing this in iTunes

Primary Method: Playlists

• Cumbersome process

• Opinions of what goes in changes over time

• Sometimes text not a great descriptor

• Boundaries of genres blur

User Study

• Aims

• Find out current usage behaviours

• Explore possibilities of other descriptors

Age Groups

• Main age group17-30 years

Collection Sizes

• Typically very large music collections

Number of Different Genres

• Diverse music collections

Choice of Media Player

Playback Method

• Selection methods most popular

• Users still want choice

A Tagging Methodology

• Tag music according to emotional response

• Use response indirectly as a filtering mechanism

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Workflow: Tagging

MusicUserListens to

Synaesthesia

Tag AppliedColour Association

Strong/Weak Synaesthesia

• Experience of perceiving in one sense when another is stimulated

• e.g. involuntary perception of colour when hearing sounds

• Rare to experience strong synaesthesia

• e.g. Grapheme → color synesthesia

• Most people experience weak synaesthesia

• e.g. Colour from timbre or key

• Some consistent trends: e.g. higher pitched sounds → brighter colours

Experiment

• 57 users

• No demographical information (deliberate)

• Discrete choice of ten colours:

Task: associate five tracks with colours

Colour Meaning Theory

Source: http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm

• Not proven, but generally accepted in western world

• Special cultural colours

• e.g. trust and stability

• Americans: generally blue

• Koreans: pink and other pastel colours

“Feels Like It Should”

Orange: Sunshine, enthusiasm, fascination,happiness, creativity,

stimulation

Purple: Ambition, wisdom, creativity

and magic. a very artificialcolour

What Does This Mean?

“Killing Time”

Red: Energy, danger, courage, power, passion and desire

Black: Power, elegance, death, eviland mystery

“This Love”

Red-orange: Pleasure, aggression, action

Light Red: Joy, sensitivity and love

“For 2 of the songs a colour came straight away and it was quite clear”

Comments

“I'm always happy when I have a good DJ, who plays songs that I like at this moment... So, choosing songs of 'similar colour' could be

helpful...”

“I only use playlists excessively because itunes doesn't have a good enough inbuilt way of

organising my music by mood”

“i think that there may be a problem with the user being inconsistent with how they associate their music with colours, especially if you consider that

they'll be doing this over the lifetime of the application”

“I love the idea. But if this is the only means to play music then it may be too restrictive.”

“...I strongly believe that there is no intrinsic property in music that suggests color. This

would be subjective and change even for a given person from situation to situation. Any association of color is external to the music

itself...”

Movements and Colour

“suites of classical music often consist of movements of varying 'colour' - one

peaceful movement, one dramatic one, etc. For an example listen to the New

World Symphony by Dvorak.”

Performance: Merging PlaylistsS

ecs

Subject

General Performance

• Colour Player: only 16% slower to assign colour than assign playlist

• Neither hard not easy (mean = 3.11, s.d = 1.05) to associate colours with music

Reasons for Colour Selection

Association Patterns

• Two dimensional self-organising map

• No clear patterns seen

• Future work to mine larger dataset

Questions?

Michael Voong and Russell BealeUniversity of Birmingham, UKwww.colourplayer.com