“Sensitive Mood Pad”: Results of the Test
We first thank all the listeners who participate to the test of the sensitive mood pad V1.
Below is the list of all the ideas you proposed and for each idea our comments: a decision as to implement it or not, why, and if yes, how/when we will implement it.
1- Add features to select/unselect genres and decades.
Musicovery: yes we will implement it, possibly in the V2 of the test
2- Possibility to exclude artists.
Musicovery: when you ban songs of an artist, this artist is less likely to be played (if your are logged); we will in a later version take your favorite/banned artists into account so that samples played on the mood pad reflect your music universe.
3- Display the title of the song, the name of the artist, the cover art, and the picture with the singer.
Musicovery: yes we will display those information on the song played by rollover; first on the V2 of the sensitive mood pad test. We will add artist picture later though.
Ideally, we would prefer our listeners to choose the mood irrespective of artists/songs from within their music universe (undesired genres can be excluded (point 1), as well as artists (point 2).
3- Samples are not playing immediately, need for a symbol/message that the interface is getting ready.
Musicovery: we will add a timer showing how much of the samples are ready to play, possibly accompanied by a text explaining that at next connection samples will play immediately.
4- Change samples so that it is not the same song which plays for a given position of the pad.
Musicovery: we will rotate samples, possibly in the next version on the site.
5- Shape of the pad: not a square, but a more round shape.
Musicovery: the square is a logical way to display objects spread all over on a 2D graphic, people understand it intuitively; we accept that it is not esthetical; we will try to alleviate this negative feeling.
6- Passing from a sound to another should be more gradual.
Musicovery: the fading out/in process would damage the comparison process, and very much so on the energy level; but we could add fading out after the click selecting the mood.
7- Multiple dimensions with separate variance control for each dimension.
Musicovery: We have designed the mood pad so that listeners can launch radios for their various music listening situations, through the most simple interface, a 2D graphic; adding other dimensions will make interaction less simple; but for a different experience we could work on a multiple dimension interface like an equalizer, using all the parameters (40) of our database; may be something to test later on the lab…
8- Add verbal mood nuances to “fine tune” the experience (for example, vectors such as sad, happy, infatuated, sensitive, regretful, and so on.
Musicovery: likewise point 9, it would make UI less simple; but we could add it in a multiple dimension interface.
9- Display the colors of the other genres on that mood and the most frequent artist.
Musicovery: for a given mood position, potentially all genres can be played, as well as almost all artists; that is why you need to personalise your music universe (see points 1 and 2).
10- Start the radio with the full song that was played on the mood pad.
Musicovery: OK, we will implement it at a later stage.
11- Use colors for moods: bright for positive, red for energy,…
Musicovery: we use colors for genres; colors can bear significant subjectiveness in terms of mood (more than music), therefore we prefer not to use it at that stage.
12- Spectrum of mood is too general, increase granularity to get more variations.
Musicovery: mood pad axes are continuous and progressive, so we could increase granularity to give a deeper level of variety of mood; but it would take much longer to load the samples.
13- Normalize volume between moods.
Musicovery: we have already normalise music files, but we will look at how to normalise it further.
14- Let people create a path, a direction on the map where the playlist would gradually change. i.e. from dark and calm to positive and energetic.
Musicovery: we had several thoughts on this idea; the problem is how to make the feature easy to use, and make the listener decide on the duration over which the transition should take place; because the listener can change at any time the mood with the current UI, we believe the complexity added by this feature would outweigh the benefits.
15- Volume control on the samples.
Musicovery: we will add it in a future version.
16- Display the name of people listen to the same mood, with their historic.
Musicovery: we will work on this.
17- Make the feature optional.
Musicovery: we will see whether listeners ask to make the sensitive mood pad an optional feature.
18- Improve sound quality
Musicovery: it takes already too much time to make samples ready to play even in lofi ; increasing sound quality would make this problem even worse.
19- Bigger screen
Musicovery: the pad is already pretty large, we are not sure this will improve the experience.
20- Tap the rectangle for listen the full song (and freeze the selection) and tap again to change to something similar.
Musicovery: interesting feature, we will look at it.
21- Widget users could embed on their websites.
Musicovery: good idea, but not in the short term.
22- No music when mouse leaves the pad.
Musicovery: we designed the test interface without the radio playing after the fine-tuning process taking place on the mood pad; we should have made it clearer that once integrated on site the mood pad will lead to the usual playlist with full songs.
