Painting the City with Sound

This art icle was downloaded by: [ 77.95.242.32] On: 05 August 2013, At : 01: 11 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ ccon20 Painting the city with music: contextaware mobile services for urban environment ab Pirkka Åman a & Lassi A. Liikkanen a Helsinki Inst it ut e for Informat ion Technology HIITAalt o Universit y, Helsinki, Finland b Media Lab Helsinki, Depart ment of Media, School of Art , Design and Archit ect ureAalt o Universit y, Helsinki, Finland Published online: 14 Jun 2013. 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Liikkanena1 a Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland; Media Lab Helsinki, Department of Media, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 b Music business is undergoing a tremendous change in the early twenty-first century. Similarly, the landscape of music delivery and discovery is drastically evolving because of new technologies. This paper presents SoundAbout, a platform for locationbased music services. It enables new applications running on mobile phones and desktops. It allows users to share music and information about music they listened to in different locations. With SoundAbout people can experience music related to the different locations in various ways, for instance by seeing what music has been listened in different districts of the city during a particular time span, select a list of favourite artists or songs and attach that list in favourable location, and see who else in different locations share their taste in music. Our goal is to not only support musical serendipity, but also affect the city culture. With context-aware music services, it is possible to offer people new kinds of urban audio experiences. In this paper, we apply characteristics of psychogeography and graffiti painting as an inspiration for the design of service concepts for the platform. Introduction Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet. (Banksy 2006) Take the Banksy quote above and replace ‘colours’ with ‘songs’ and ‘phrases’ with ‘sounds’. Imagine that you have a spray can full of music, millions of songs you can use to paint the city with music, take over the city by dropping music in places meaningful to you, all over the town and share those location, time and music combinations with your friends, or with anybody to explore, enjoy and modify. This thought experiment is an example of services that new mobile technologies make possible and what might become commonplace in the future through mediators such as the SoundAbout platform we introduce in this paper. There are reasons to believe that this is both feasible and desirable in the near future. Music experience is essentially contextual. It cannot be taken apart of the situation it is listened to, owing much to the physical and social surroundings that accompany it. Imagine sitting in a tram alone, listening to a violin concerto at full blast. The experience creates a contrasting audio soundtrack to the landscape passing by, taking the passenger somewhere else, in an escapist psychological bubble (Bull 2004). Or, when listening in company, one’s musical selections usually differ from those listened alone, because music *Corresponding author. Email: pirkka.aman@aalto.fi; pirkkaaman@gmail.com q 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 2 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen works as social glue. Music takes us from the moment and connects us to it. Music connects us to others and distances us from them. One of the most important functions of music in contemporary society is mood regulation (Levitin 2007; Saarikallio and Erkkilä 2007). Most music listeners might take pride at being able to select the right music to achieve particular emotional states, even if they talk about music mostly as an enabler to do things. The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing technology has created a hybrid space – a virtual layer of digital information and interaction opportunities that sit on top of and augment the physical environment (Bilandzic 2010). Augmented and virtual realities enable us to construct new fabrics of reality by technology to eradicate present limitations of space and time, and designers and researchers today explore ways to enhance and empower people’s situated real world experience with digital media. New services do not just promote novelty function, but also survival in the digital jungle. Today’s information abundance and diversity of products has made recommendations increasingly important in helping people to find the content they are interested in (Celma 2010). In computer science, the study of recommendation systems has spawned considerable interest and even a dedicated conference series started in 2007 (ACM Recommender Systems; http://recsys.acm.org/). Music is one of the most important media in this development, as massive online libraries of music have become available for free or at a minimal cost (e.g. http://pandora.com, http://spotify.com) and average personal music collections have exploded to cover hundreds and hundreds of digitally stored albums and tracks (Brinegar and Capra 2011). We can assume that nearly all music ever recorded is already available in some form online. The problem for the consumers is how to find the most interesting and serendipitous, positively surprising new music (Adomavicius and Tuzhilin 2005). For us, the channels for music recommendation and discovery are diverse and are not restricted only to dedicated digital music recommendation services and technologies. Thus, recommendation also covers radio, TV, blogs, print media and social recommendations such as friends or strangers recommending music either in private or public places, such as bars or clubs. Today, radio and word-of-mouth still remain the most important channels of discovering new music (Nielsen 2012). In this paper, we present our framework for experimental mobile music services called SoundAbout. It is an example of augmenting the urban soundscape and a means for appropriating the public space. Our framework can be seen as a contextual recommendation system, based on content-based recommendations and collaborative filtering (social recommendations). SoundAbout is a roof concept for several music services accessible with mobile devices capable of accurate location tracking and Internet communication. It combines extensive music database, location data, recommendations and a map application. Other information types, such as various types of user-generated information (e.g. user-created descriptors or tags for songs), may also be considered as feeds for having an effect on the music offered to users. There are several goals for the SoundAbout project, of which some are designoriented (generating technology) and some research-oriented (generating knowledge), which is typical of human – computer interaction (HCI) research (Fallman 2003). Therefore, our approach could be described as HCI research through design endeavour. As an inspiration for design, we apply concepts and phenomena studied by social sciences and design research (Krippendorff 2006). We are connected to cultural studies on several aspects, by the necessity of understanding the existing and paralleling cultures of technology usage, and the desire to shape the practices of everyday media use into something new. Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 3 On the research side, the prototype will be used as a research tool to investigate the phenomena of HCI and social aspects of location-based tools that allow people to consume, create and share audio content. Design goals relate to designing services that empower people in their everyday lives, for example by offering people meaningful musical experiences in very ordinary everyday situations, such as when walking, travelling in or waiting for public transit, and making moments in everyday life special by offering musical serendipity. Moreover, design goals include developing new kinds of music-service concepts by prototyping and gathering expert and user opinions in iterative development cycles, resulting in improved designs. We aim to provide people tools to control and modify their everyday lives by giving them ubiquitous, personalizable and context-aware audio tools. At the core of the platform’s concept development is to explore rich and heterogeneous collections of musical content together with location-aware technologies. We want to understand how to create rewarding and pleasantly surprising use experiences for the users, and how to waive an enticing fabric of sound over the existing layers of urban soundscape. In the ethos of ‘social media’, we aim at the sharing of experiences by using music and contextual information, and the city as an ever-evolving canvas. Considering geographical space to be a canvas that allows the inscription of personal narratives, desires and memories offers a powerful instrument for individuals and communities to co-create their environment and to collectively organize and share experiences. Research questions include: How do our ideas of empowering the urban music consumer with new technologies change the cultural landscape that exists this far? What are the most feasible contextual factors for personalized music recommendations? How to offer users location-based music that matches user’s taste or broadens it by offering musical surprises? How do differing music consumption patterns reflect the different identities of the districts of the city or a larger area? Let us start from the functions and appeal of ‘private’ music in physical, public space and how people construct their everyday lives within the wider societal structures. Background: appropriation of public space with sound The importance of appropriating the physical and social space for private use is reflected through the thoughts of several authors in the literature. de Certeau (1984) provides a useful concept pair, the dichotomy of ‘strategy versus tactics of space’. This is useful for envisioning how people could take over the public space by linking music with contextual information, such as location and time. Other phenomena we find useful are psychogeography and graffiti that will be introduced later on. De Certeau’s ‘strategy’ refers to infrastructure, authority and institutions, which set the frame wherein people negotiate their everyday life, using various ‘tactics’. Tactics refer to the creative intelligence that we employ to ensure our environment works to meet our needs. Tactics allow ordinary people to subvert the all-pervasive pressures of consumerism, economics and politics, and to regain their individuality. While Marx (1971) counts upon social uprising as the catalyst for change, de Certeau finds empowerment in the small details and qualitative differences of everyday culture. For de Certeau, the longing for a revolution or societal utopia has been replaced by creative survival at a very basic level. Consumer society cannot be avoided and mainstream culture dictates, but consumers can create personal meanings by the manipulations of consumerist technologies, and the active roles they take through the consumption of objects and media (de Certeau 1984). Applications such as those based on SoundAbout can be designed to allow people to use different Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 4 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen audio-geographical tactics to make the everyday urban living more interesting and personal. Empowerment here means augmenting people’s experience of the city they are visiting or living in. There are hundreds of millions mobile phone users moving around the metropolises of the world, but most of them will surely attest to the absolute uniqueness of their portable music player’s library. For each of them, moving through the very ordinary spaces of the city can become a completely singular and poetic experience. The addition of a personal soundscape makes de Certeau’s ‘chorus of idle footsteps’ (e.g. unavoidable everyday travelling such as commuting) literal and immediate (de Certeau 1984). The city becomes stratified with psychological experiences of what has been called ‘eight million cities in this naked city. They dispute and disagree. The New York City you live in is not my New York City. How could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking’ (Whitehead and DJ Spooky 2003). Michael Bull (2000, 2004, 2007) is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of cultural research on mobile music in urban contexts. He is interested in the ways personal music players change how people construct their social worlds. Until recently, people used personal music players, such as Walkmans, to isolate themselves from others, but with digital players (iPods, etc.) and mobile music services (Spotify, Last.FM, Rdio, etc.), people are also increasingly sharing their musical experiences, music collections and listening behaviours. That changes our relationship with music and with each other. For Bull, appropriation of space is not only occurring physically, but mobile media technologies also have the capacity to create a non-spatialized conceptual space or a subjective aural private bubble. He analyses this phenomena from the perspective of the mobile user: As geographic notions of personal space become harder to substantiate and negotiate in some urban environments, the construction of a privatized conceptual space becomes a common strategy for personal stereo users . . . [they] appear to achieve a subjective sense of public invisibility. The users essentially ‘disappear’ as interacting subjects withdrawing into various states of the purely subjective. (Bull 2004, 284– 285) By listening to music with headphones people create a non-space within the public space. In situations such as commuting, music provides a soundtrack for the often monotonous everyday travel and landscape. Our framework aims at connecting music in places, or routes of travel, and making possible a new, aesthetically pleasing sensory layer. Bull (2004) has studied communication and building of identities through the use and appropriation of mobile music technologies, whereas we aim to offer a technological framework that people can use for appropriation of public space. Bull studies existing technologies whereas our focus is on the design and development of future technologies. In both the cases, experience of public space is being modified and taken over by mobile music technologies. Also, we share the view that music adds something tangible to a place, capable of being modified and shared socially. By suggesting the SoundAbout platform, on the one hand, we add to Bull’s observations of urban soundscape a personal audio bubble in a public space and, on the other hand, social sharing of music, a few additional dimensions: context-sensitivity and possibility to make the urban soundscape one’s own by planting music, location and time combinations. But before presenting our platform and service concept examples, we introduce two inspirational practices and phenomena: psychogeography and graffiti. The concept of psychogeography was defined and developed by Guy Debord in 1955 in the leftist journal Potlach. Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, film-maker and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 5 Psychogeography can be seen as a pseudo-academic endeavour of ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Debord [1955] 2006). Another definition, more suitable for our purposes for modifying the urban landscape: Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities . . . just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of the urban landscape. (Hart 2004) One practice in psychogeography is the making of psychogeographic maps that are used as guides for experiencing the urban landscape in deviant ways. Psychogeographic maps can be often seen as pieces of art, as well. For example, modified London metro map appeared in posters of a demonstration in 2003, with the station names replaced with the capitals of different countries (Wikipedia 2011). The poster had a text: ‘Meet you at Jerusalem 3.33 pm’. Another practice is making maps for walking the city in a way different from usual everyday practices. Another example from the same city is London Cross, a straight-line walk across London. As psychogeographer Paul Lyons puts it: ‘If you walk across a great city such as London in two straight lines, south to north and east to west – a crosssection – what do you find?’ (London Cross website 2011, http://www.londoncross.co.uk/). Probably the most famous psychogeography map is Debord’s (1957) Guide Pychogéographique de Paris (Figure 1). It is an example of mapping the atmospheric unities of a city on the basis of ideas of the Situationist movement. The map of Paris has been split into different areas that are experienced as distinct unities. The mentally felt distance between these areas is visualized by spreading out the pieces of the cut up map. By wandering, letting oneself float or drift, people can discover their own ambient unities of Figure 1. Guide Psychogéographique de Paris. Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 6 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen the city. Arrows indicate the most frequently used crossings between the islands of the urban archipelago separated by flows of motorized traffic (van Tijen 2011). For its Situationists founders and its modern practitioners alike, psychogeography is essentially fuelled by dissatisfaction with urban environment and how it is designed. At its core is a strong desire to make the everyday urban living more interesting. This strikes a powerful chord with what we are suggesting with SoundAbout platform. We aim at giving people tools for creating and sharing new meanings for places that are created by userdriven action, without political or economic top-down planning. Graffiti is probably the most visible manifestation of grass-roots modification of urban space. Some see it as an art form, others as mere vandalism. It can also be conceived as one of the tactics for empowering appropriation of the public space, and a psychogeographic practice. Sociologist Jeff Ferrell has studied graffiti widely (1996, 2001; Ferrell and Sanders 1995). For him, graffiti subcultures are aesthetics-driven communities that mix innovation, crime, artistic activities and questioning the authorities. Graffiti crime is not ordinary crime; it belongs to the crimes of style: painters challenge the aesthetics of authority, and those who have defined urban environment and its ideal organization and rules (Ferrell 1996). Public space is not just a means to make money, but also a forum for identity building, social observations and communality. Different actors have different understanding of urban spaces and their functions, and conflicts and controlling actions are thus unavoidable. Public space is always a cultural space, a place of contested perception and negotiated understanding, and a place where people of all sorts encode their sense of self, neighbourhood and community. Therefore, the occupation of public areas remains as much symbolic as physical (Ferrell 2001). For those in power, at stake is their dream, a dream of spatial and perceptual control that others (graffiti painters, guerrilla gardeners, etc.) might consider a dystopian nightmare – a potential police state of a particularly damaging sort. For Ferrell, anti-graffiti policies mean cleansing the public space of marginalized populations, and cleared of uncomfortable reminders of social otherness they present (Ferrell 2001). For the painters, graffiti has four main motivations (Snyder 2009). Most of the graffiti painters stress the importance of working together, and for many, social motivations are the most important incentive to start painting. Although there are also famous solo painters, such as street artist Banksy, a smallish group of painters, crew, is the most common unit of action. Crew is an informal group of painters doing graffiti together and its tag is usually painted in side of the pieces, graffiti works. Communicating crew’s own style to other painters and crews is an important motivation for doing pieces (Ferrell 2001; Snyder 2009). Crew’s fame depends upon each of the members being active, so a productive painter is valuable for the crew. Commitment in many cases is so strong that crew can function as individuals’ primary social group (Austin 2001, 120). Collective levels include street-art-related demonstrations, weblogs and Internet discussion forums. Personal motivations, visibility and fame build on painter’s signature, tag. Personal tag is used in achieving respect inside the subculture. The more a painter spreads his tag, the more street credibility he gets, but only within the subculture, because those outside of it cannot recognize the different tag styles and other cultural conventions. ‘He’s all over the city’, is a widely used statement of respect. Building long-lasting fame is often hard: painters change their tags to avoid sanctions. Security firms and police keep photo archives that are used to identify painters’ works, and based on the stylistic evidence, painters can be punished for pieces painted years back (Ferrell 2001; Snyder 2009). Aesthetic motivations are built around the need to express oneself, the desire to create something own and unique. Ambitious painters develop their style constantly, combining Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 7 various techniques and conventions. Aesthetic motivations become typically more important as the painting career gets longer, and the focus moves towards doing polished pieces in undisturbed places. In media the aesthetic dimension is often emphasized. Most painters have been fed up of stereotypical discourse asking, ‘Is graffiti a true art form?’ (Ferrell 2001; Snyder 2009). Destructive motivations: graffiti has an intrinsic dimension of rebellious and destructive vandalism as well. In some cases, motivation for doing graffiti is simply an urge to cause damage or to provoke police or security firms (Ferrell 2001). Many painters openly admit this: ‘Graffiti is destructive, but that is just an indirect answer to the public destruction that advertising has brought. If you study graffiti as an urban phenomenon, it started same time as mass marketing’ (Painter ‘Grey’ in Labonté 2003, 170). In SoundAbout, we want to offer an alternative to the urban soundscapes people have to encounter in shopping malls and other spaces designed by and for market forces. The platform must be built as an open system, so that innovative uses through user creativity are supported. Graffiti is essentially illegitimate, and that is the main difference between graffiti practices and SoundAbout framework. We aim to provide music lovers discreet, invisible and legal ways to take over places and spaces. Still, there are several mutual characteristics of our planned audio framework and graffiti. Graffiti is ubiquitous, and that is the goal of our framework as well. Graffiti can be considered as the art and expression of the untrained. Similarly, our framework is meant for everyone, and the interactions should be designed so that using SoundAbout would be as easy as holding a can of paint. The differences between graffiti and SoundAbout are also numerous. Graffiti aesthetics are often intentionally rude and in-your-face, perception is involuntary and unavoidable, and based on sight. SoundAbout is designed to be discreet, its perception is voluntary (turning the app on, wearing headphones on) based on sound and invisible. Both aim at creating people’s own spaces inside the city and upon the public urban infrastructure, and filling the ever-present desire and need of marking one’s own territory. We conclude our comparison by arguing that although graffiti and SoundAbout are in many ways different practices of augmenting urban space, graffiti painters’ motivations and the analogue and comparison of graffiti and SoundAbout is fruitful and adds inspiration in designing and researching our platform and its service concepts; graffiti give us directions to build same kind of need fulfilment opportunities in our system. Some of the motivations for using SoundAbout are clearly overlapping with those of graffiti: personal, social and aesthetic, and we will handle those later on when presenting the service concepts. Along the design process, we will organize co-design workshops where user needs, desires and motivations are mapped. Mobile applications are designed according to those user motivations, and they are usertested in realistic contexts to ensure the user input in every phase of the process. Related systems Recommendation systems have traditionally been two-dimensional: users are recommended either items, such as books and films, or other user profiles, as in dating services. Additional contextual information types have the potential for providing more accurate, more interesting and serendipitous recommendations for mobile media users’ variable conditions (Adomavicius and Tuzhilin 2005; Celma 2010). This means adding information not only about time, place or company user is in, but also more marginal information types such as weather conditions, biosignals (heart rate or skin conductivity) or activity (e.g. running, driving, climbing) (see e.g. van der Zwaag, Westerink, and van den Broek 2009). 8 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Commercial examples There are only a few examples of contextual music recommendation services to be found yet. In commercial music recommendations systems such as Last.FM, Pandora and iTunes’ Genius (see Figure 2), users receive music recommendations based on various Figure 2. Screenshots of Pandora and Foursquare. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 9 factors, including on track, artist or user similarities (Celma 2010). However, these are not designed for ubiquitous use and provide limited or no use of context or location information. For instance, Last.FM apparently utilizes location information only to recommend live music. Spotisquare is an example of existing mobile contextual music service. It allows users to connect Spotify playlists with places, typically bars and clubs, using their Foursquare accounts (see Figure 2). However, users must link places and playlists manually, and there are no automated recommendations (Spotisquare website 2011, http:// www.spotisquare.com). Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Research prototypes Various research prototypes of music recommendations systems for mobile devices exist. They aim to provide people tools for serendipitous, contextual music experiences, however, they are not taking full advantage of contextual information. We will next provide examples of the research prototypes. SoundPryer (Östergren 2004) is an application running on Wi-fi-enabled mobile phones and designed for sharing music between cars in proximity. Push!Music (Jacobsson et al. 2006) is a prototype wireless peer-to-peer mobile music player with sharing capabilities. This player enables users to push songs to each other’s mobile terminals. In user study, it was shown that the participants had two main reasons for sharing the songs: dissemination where the sender liked the songs and wanted others to hear it as well, and recommendation when the sender sent a song that he believed the receiver would appreciate. BluetunA (Baumann et al. 2007) is a music-sharing application running on mobile phones that allows users to share information about their favourite music with other users within Bluetooth range. Users may also receive recommendations from the Last.FM web service, which allows reaching more people and providing more accurate recommendations than a system based on Bluetooth. BluetunA is not focused primarily on the sharing of music content. BluetunA represents a lightweight application aimed at increasing people’s awareness of their surroundings. Bubbles is a wireless peer-to-peer application for sharing multimedia content on mobile devices (Bach et al. 2003). When another mobile device is in the range of the wireless network card, it is possible for these devices to share music and playlists. This application allows the user to choose between listening to streamed music or downloading it. Bubbles does not provide recommendations. SuperMusic (Lehtiniemi 2008) is a prototype streaming context-aware mobile music service. It utilizes 2,00,000 track music catalogue including two different music recommendation methods in addition to social interaction of the users. The prototype aims to find new music for the users out of the online music catalogue using two criteria: similarity and the context of the user. In Supermusic, contextual recommendations are calculated from users’ whereabouts using GPS (Global Positioning System) and cell ID, together with time. The users can rate the recommended music and let the system learn in order to provide better recommendations. IM4Sports (Wijnalda et al. 2005) is a portable adaptive music player aimed for sports exercise use. Context data, such as heartbeat and stride speed, are collected and used for giving recommendations or adjusting the tempo of a song. The context data have to be transferred to a PC for analysis and the recommended playlists need to be transferred to the mobile device before the exercise. Lifetrak (Reddy and Mascia 2006) uses a contextsensitive music engine to drive what music is played. The context engine is influenced by the location of the user, the time of operation, the velocity of the user and urban environment information such as traffic, weather and sound modalities. However, 10 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen recommendations in Lifetrak do not consider the user’s listening habits; neither can users change the predetermined playing order of the music tracks. Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 SoundAbout platform Designing urban audio experiences Our design process included several phases described in the following paragraphs: laying out the abstract requirements, envisioning concepts, testing concepts in focus groups, implementing concepts as a software prototype and testing the prototype. On a conceptual level, there are several categories of information required to build a location-based music platform. We need to collect information about played music, location and the user. For the interface, we have requirements for visualizing the appropriate information and most importantly providing easy access to music. For the service to be useful and provide social networking capabilities, for instance, we need to build up a decent user base that is willing to utilize our platform. With SoundAbout, we aim to collect the location data automatically and recommend music in real time. The recent revolution of mobile Internet and new massive subscription-based online music catalogues such as Spotify and Rdio have made possible the development of such services legally. A user focus group was held in order to get feedback for the service concepts envisioned by the authors of this paper. The group consisted of eight active mobile music users aged 18 – 40 years. The users saw Hotspots as the most feasible of the concepts, most flexible and most rewarding for them, as it provides users multiple tools for modifying the urban soundscape and experiencing places in a personalizable and discreet way. A version of Hotspots was therefore chosen to be the first concept to prototype. Implementing the platform The mobile-use cases are not only the most interesting, but also the most challenging. While current mobile technology can transfer, process and store music content without difficulties, there are still technical bottlenecks in the process. These concern mostly battery life when using 3G connections and GPS receiver and the synchronization interval in client –server protocols. These considerations must be kept in mind while trying to design a pleasurable user experience for mobile music in each proposed service. The choices over technology influence what we can get out of the system. For instance, there are multiple solutions to positioning (GPS, cell ID, network, Wi-Fi), which all have different pros and cons (accuracy, power consumption). Potential design parameters from the application development point of view are presented in Table 1. On the ethical, normative side of design research, our platform should ideally be offered for free as a mobile phone and web application in an easy-to-use, portable form across different manufacturers’ technical platforms and across cities over the different continents, making its as ubiquitous as graffiti painting. Service concepts SoundAbout platform supports various service concepts. We present here three concept examples that we are planning to implement as demonstrators for the platform. All service concepts aim to empower the everyday lives of users differently, and by offering means of appropriation, modification and bricolage of the urban spaces by audio tools. Locationaware music services have the potential of offering people new ways of appropriation of Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Design space parameters. Location Time Music meta-info Information about user Need for visualization GPS coordinate Seconds Artist Name Path (time – space) Street address Track duration Track title User name Point GSM positioning Hours Age group Area/district Cell ID Time of day Album name/ version of recording Track number Sex Taste aggregate District/area Day Publication year City/municipality Week Composer/music or lyrics Country Month Lyrics Season (spring, etc.) Year Album art Pointer (Spotify, all music guide, etc.) Info on user’s other service accounts (user names) User-given info on taste Contact (email, Twitter, etc.) Content availability Identifier (genre, title, etc.) Link outside (Last.FM, etc.) Preview (e.g. 30second Last.FM link) Music content (researcher made ad hoc library) Massive online library: Spotify, Pandora, Last.FM, etc. Ultimate library: all the music content available (Minimum) Mobile app user base requirements 1 None 2 –15 GPS 15 – 30 Upload data 31 – 100 Personal music player, upload data Download and/or stream music 100– 1000 1000– 10,000 . 10,000 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Table 1. 11 12 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen the public space, different from practices of, for example, graffiti painting. In our system, taking over public space by music (specifically by headphone listening) is invisible, personal and a much more discreet way of appropriation of space than graffiti. For our purposes, graffiti serves as an inspiration and a fruitful metaphor: painting the city with sound, and for us, as researchers and designers, it is useful to take a look behind the graffiti, i.e. piece on the wall. SoundAbout extends the ways of appropriation to the social sharing of music: users could drop and scatter music at specific places or geographical areas. Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Musical Hotspots Musical Hotspots is a roof concept for various ideas about user-chosen location and sound and/or music combination. Users can leave sounds in different locations to create hotspots and trails of sound marking music that is listened in certain areas. Those location/sound combinations evolve, change and fade over time to be found by other people, resulting in a city scattered with sound. For example, users can leave a song or record a piece of speech or that place’s soundscape by tagging the location information to that sound/music combination, to be found for a certain time window, just like graffiti pieces that are essentially transitory. User motivations for adding sound to a place are multiple. Some places remind us of a certain piece of music, sometimes it would be nice to tag a special place and what happened there, with a piece of music, and share those with meaningful others. Research motivations are centred in investigating what kinds of appropriation strategies people use in making parts of the public space their own by audio/location tagging. Beyond and with ‘taking into possession’, appropriation strategies may include ‘articulation of own identity’ and ‘distancing from majority’. These strategies connect with de Certeau’s (1984) dichotomy of ‘strategy vs. tactics of space’: infrastructure, authority and institutions set the frame wherein people negotiate their everyday life. Our goal is to apply psychogeographic ideas for our map application visualizations. Maps have several functions. Maps visualize multiple sources of data that can be filtered using personal preferences, for example, ‘places where I spent time with my girlfriend in Summer 2011 listening Miles Davis’. Music dropped to places give new, shared meanings to the places and maps are used to visualize these (see Figure 3). Maps can show routes or ‘music walks’ that local artists, event organizers, tourists or locals may want others to experience. We take psychogeography’s central point: ‘how this place feels’ to communicate ‘I felt like this listening this music in that place in that time . . . .’ Musical Treasure Hunt Musical Treasure Hunt owes much to geocaching, which is the practice of hiding a small container in a particular location, then publishing the latitude and longitude coordinates of the location on a geocaching website for other ‘geocachers’ to find using a GPS device (Geocaching website 2011, http://www.geocaching.com). In essence, it is a GPS-enabled outdoor treasure hunt. Geocaching – and our suggestion of Musical Treasure Hunt – is motivating to the users for several reasons (O’Hara 2008): It gives outdoor activity a sense of purpose, and makes exploring new places meaningful. The geocaching website keeps record of all the different caches a particular geocacher have done. Building this up, as a collection is an important driver for continued participation. Part of the value of collecting practices comes from being immersed within the social context of the geocaching community, and how the achievements are represented to others. Finding the caches can be very challenging, and it can be seen that location-based technologies provide value not Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13 Figure 3. Example of a user-created musical hotspot with time-sensitive playlist on a mobile phone display. simply by making it easy to get information at the right place and time, but also by making it difficult. In Musical Treasure Hunt, users seek musical treasures marked by GPS coordinates. It is also possible to gather musical clues in different points of a musical treasure path, and add time-based competitions (‘who finds first’). It can be seen as an augmented reality service, where users move around the city to reach the city. Within the domain of locationbased computing, geocaching represents an interesting research topic. As a technologyenabled location-based activity, it is useful in understanding both itself and also other location-based practices. In geocaching, people participate not just through the consumption of location-based experiences but also through the creation of these experiences for others (O’Hara 2008). Musical geocaching can be used to study the ways in which people give meanings to and appropriate the location-based ubiquitous media. Sounds of Helsinki Just as cities such as London, Atlanta and Oslo (Lee and Cunningham 2012) are trendsetters in music consumption on national and global scales, districts of a city have their own identities and social positions. Geo-cultural idiosyncrasies reflect the music listened in different areas. Using this concept, we want to study and illustrate the constantly changing musical identities of different districts and how musical memes, 14 P. Åman and L.A. Liikkanen e.g. new music releases, spread in urban areas. Name Sounds of Helsinki refers to the city and its districts that inspired the initial concept idea. The music listened in different districts of the city generate playlists that change over time. Users are offered playlists and recommendations in their mobile phone while moving around the town based on, for example, the popularity of music listened in those areas or by filtering based on personal preferences. Motivations for the users include discovering new music and thereby getting joy out of very ordinary everyday life situations like commuting. This concept also allows local artists to tag their music according to the places it was created at, where the artist hails from or which locations the lyrics refer to. These pieces of information may be combined with information on past, future or ongoing live performances. Visualizations on a map application are a type of psychogeographyinspired maps in a form of web mash-ups. Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Reflections of the first working prototype: festival recommender The field trials of the first prototype, an urban music and events recommender, were conducted in August 2011 in Helsinki during urban festival called Helsingin Juhlaviikot. Prototype was designed for a smartphone with mobile web browser. We wanted to offer users a simple and elegant way of getting recommendations unprepared and on the move. Compared to many other recommendation services, to receive quality recommendations users does not need to train the recommender at all. Users were sent notification of a new recommendation by pop-up screen. By touching the pop-up window, user enters the actual user interface, which shows the name of the event, the address and a map automatically scaled so that the location of the user and the recommended event location are presented as points on the map. Media player was also provided, with relevant music or video link. Moreover, we provided thumbs up, thumbs down function for instantly gathering user response. Of the 241 recommendations sent, 88% were checked out, indicating that the system was effective in increasing awareness of available events. Of the recommendations that were viewed, 35% were rated as good (thumbs up), 22% as poor and 43% were not rated. Although individual event recommendations were not considered particularly interesting, according to the overall satisfaction survey, users were satisfied with the service prototype and the recommendations it provided for determining which events to attend. Temporal and spatial relevance of the recommendations was not very important for people living in a mid-size European metropolis with relatively short distances and an efficient public transportation system. The responses also suggest that the recommendations had little impact on the behaviour of the participants, mainly due to the users pre-planning their daily schedule. However, in their verbal feedback, participants reported having an increased and intensified feeling of living in the flow of the city. Users felt strongly that they are part of the city life that is happening around them, even if they were not going to attend the events. The user responses also indicate that most of the recommendations were for artists who were previously unknown to the participant and for events that the participant had not heard of before. Together with the high consumption rate of additional media, the results indicate that our prototype was effective in supporting serendipity (Forsblom et al. 2012). Conclusion According to our results, the first prototype was successful in providing serendipitous recommendations and adding empowerment in the participants lives in an urban context. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15 Empowerment translates here mostly as an added intensity of experience of living in the city’s stream of events, generated by the received recommendations. The research proceeds by implementing various prototypes of research concepts under the umbrella of the SoundAbout platform, including user research and iterative design cycles where new functionalities are added, e.g. various visualizations and contextual data for producing better recommendations, and by that, novel ways of making urban everyday life richer by giving people sound, time and location-based tools. Note 1. E-mail: lassi.liikkanen@aalto.fi Downloaded by [77.95.242.32] at 01:11 05 August 2013 Notes on contributors Pirkka Åman is a post-graduate student at Media Lab Helsinki, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. In his doctoral dissertation he studies how to support music discovery and recommendation through ubiquitous interfaces. Lassi A. Liikkanen is a post-doctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Aalto University, Finland. His research topics include music interaction, interaction design, earworms, and design psychology. His publications have appear in several international journals and conferences in music psychology, design research, and human-computer interaction. References Adomavicius, G., and A. Tuzhilin. 2005. “Towards the Next Generation of Recommender Systems: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Possible Extensions.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 17 (6): 734– 749. Austin, J. 2001. 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