Music Mood Wheel: Improving Browsing Experience on Digital Content through an Audio Interface

Mobile devices for listening to digital music can now contain a huge number of musical titles. Search for appropriate music content becomes difficult and time-consuming. The interfaces on MP3 CD players or flash MP3 players available on the market usually combine buttons, jog-wheels and small displays of one to three lines. The most common approach to music browsing is still either one-step forward and backward movement with two buttons, or moving inside a tree of options. In our approach, we shift from the "tree of options" paradigm to a "search by ear" browsing experience. Following the construction of a first rough prototype we found that our interface performed well in an experiment with 40 participants, on a collection of 3500 songs. Ongoing and future works cover the development of an advanced pro to type on a smartphone running the Windows mobile operating system and a new experiment in similar conditions