Using Animated Mood Pictures in Music Recommendation

This paper studies the idea of using animated mood pictures in the context of music recommendation. In the implemented prototype, the user interacts with a collection of pictures to receive new music recommendations from associated genres. The prototype was evaluated by 40 Finnish participants. After the first use of the prototype, the concept of selecting music based on mood pictures was found to be very good by 85% of the participants. In the longer-term use, the prototype lacked some important features such as the ability to personalize the picture and music associations. Despite this, 60% of the participants were interested in using the prototype to complement their other music player applications. This indicates that mood pictures are a promising way to access music collections and to explore new music.