💡Setting our sights on insight💡
Exploring music beyond academia
Welcome back! 💖 This publication follows the MHCI Amazon Music team as they seek to eliminate the barrier between private digital music experiences and “in real life” (IRL) music experiences. We’ll be cataloguing our sprint-by-sprint process, as well as any insights we gain along the way.
For more information about our project, MHCI, and our team, check out our first blog post.
✨ Follow this publication for updates on our progress and milestones! ✨
Guerrilla Research 🤔
One of the most important realizations our team had during the last sprint was the need to find real users’ needs and experiences when it comes to music. We developed a guerrilla research plan that spanned 3 days across various ages, occupations, and interests.
We set out into Pittsburgh with our plan in mind, and what we encountered while interviewing strangers was openness, respect, patience, and valuable insights that would not have been reached otherwise.
Some of the most interesting things we found were:
- A clear differentiation between passive and active music discovery
- Passive refers to music discovery as a background activity, one that lacks intent
- Active refers to the participation of self and others in music discovery as a forefront activity
- A clear differentiation between person-based memories associated with music and activity-based memories associated with music
- A cycle that exists where music changes environment, environment pulls in certain people, and people influence what music is played
Diary Studies 📖 ✍️
In addition to guerilla research, we developed a diary study that required participants to record music they had been listening to throughout their day.
Ultimately, as we had originally hypothesized, participants’ records of music listening were sparse. The post-study interviews, however, were invaluable in that they allowed us to dig deep into motivations and decisions behind each moment of music listening.
We found that:
- Music plays an important role in determining the performance of an individual on a task
- Music is used to focus individuals on work at hand
- Music is used to increase or decrease sense of energy to match a task
- Music listeners are willing to sacrifice various aspects of their music listening experience (eg. novelty, accurate pairing of song and activity or song and environment) for quick and easy access
Musicians + Content Creators 🎙️👩🎤👨
A big focus for our team this sprint was shifting our primary research from academics to content creators and musicians. Our faculty director, Skip Shelly, and our faculty advisor, Raelin Muscara, were able to point us to some local figures. We were able to speak with Eric Singer, Vincent Nania, Roger Dannenberg, Jay Green, and Jesse Stiles.
Here are some key insights we loved from them:
- Artists are caught in a filter bubble, much like listeners.
- The transition to music streaming has resulted in greater levels of apathy in regards to audio quality.
- Consumers prefer simple interactions and experiences when it comes to music streaming platforms.
- Streaming media today has turned its back on human-led curation.
- Playlist placement drives discovery for aspiring musicians.
- Lack of fluidity between streaming platforms and social media is a pain point for artists.
- Streaming platforms lack retrospective self understanding in editing.
Work Hard Play Hard 📸📸📸
A gallery of our week.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more updates from our team! 💖🎵👏
