03.06 + 03.08: Framing + Precedents
Discussion and Direction (Continued Brainstorming)
March 6, 2018 — We’re still exploring
On Thursday, before we leave for spring break, we will be having a “stand up” and presenting our idea to the class to receive some feedback and explain our current status.
At the moment, these are a few of the topics and questions we’re drawn to:
Can we use music to augment the experience of a space or location? (public or private)
What would music do for travelers or natives/locals?
How can music encourage exploration?
How could this idea be applied to travelers visiting Pittsburgh?
Should the musical identity of different spaces be curated?
How could we create a city’s “sound identity?”
How would listening experiences differ between individual and group settings?How could music encourage people to go outside and experiment?
How can sound act as a guide?
Thinking more about local identity, we explored a few existing services that aim to provide travelers with a curated look at particular cities and neighborhoods including On the Grid.
We found this approach of creating curated guides to different neighborhoods compelling, but had some concerns about its applicability in terms of music. We liked the idea of a location-based identity, but felt this might be hard to define based on something as personal as music taste. We also discussed the potential for pooling data from an area (perhaps via Spotify if possible) to serve as a basis for these neighborhood musical “profiles” but had concerns about privacy and data mining practices.
To push the local identity direction a bit further, we talked about the idea of choreographing an experience — potentially creating something like an audio tour with music. This approach ultimately felt too prescribed and we had doubts about the ultimate efficacy / desirability of this type of service.
Another common interest we discovered early on was data visualization, so we’ve also been discussing potential intersections of data and music. We wondered how music preference could relate to behavior and the impact music could have on influencing someone’s mood or actions. (One concern was in following to closely in MoodMedia’s footsteps — this approach felt somehow predatory and not particularly inspiring for us.)
We asked:
What could companies, researchers, or governments do with data about music preference or listening habits?
Could this data be somehow used to create positive impact in a community?
Could this data be integrated into a feedback loop for the service that provides a better experience for its customers?
How should the data be gathered? (Without becoming invasive?)
How could this data be visualized in compelling ways?
We explored some examples of music-related data visualization for inspiration.
While we found these examples interesting and visually exciting, we struggled to find a compelling reason to make listening data surveyable outside of a corporate / marketing purpose. (For example we discussed potential for music interests to be leveraged as a means of community engagement and organization or political participation.) We didn’t find a spark down this path, and decided to keep data visualizations in the back of our minds as a potential component of another concept down the road, rather than focusing on it as the primary service.
We continued our discussion in a meeting before Thursday’s class. Drawing on our interest in location-based musical identity, we chose to narrow our scope from neighborhoods to individual venues such as cafes. We discussed potential opportunities for business owners to curate a distinct brand identity for their business based on a variety of parameters that could be adjusted at will. We also imagined potential for collective participation from a space’s occupants, giving customers control over the environment and allowing the “music identity” to evolve.
March 8, 2018 — Class Standup
Our proposal for the standup was that we could create a service for people who are playing music in a business environment — e.g. a cafe — and the system would intelligentlly create a playlist based on things like demographic and desired mood, while potentially allowing for the occupants of the space to influence the playlist in real time (via upvoting or downvoting.)
