Gastvortrag Noah Henry, University of Amsterdam (19.11.2024)

Titel:

Modelling Music Selection in Everyday Life

Forschungskolloquium Systematische Musikwissenschaft, 19.11.2024, 14 Uhr Neuer Seminarraum

Abstract:

Music is a highly functional and utilitarian resource, enabling people to regulate emotions, reduce distractions, stimulate physical action, and connect with others. However, with technologically facilitated listening now commonplace, new problems have emerged: how, given millions of songs to choose from, should providers curate music listening experiences? Online platforms typically employ recommender systems to resolve this, and there have been efforts to orient these systems to be responsive to the short-term, dynamic needs in everyday listening. However, with increasing scrutiny around the impact of recommender systems in terms of interpretability and data usage, researchers have also begun considering ways of explicitly integrating knowledge about listener behaviours into the recommendation process. This presentation presents work that aims to bridge these areas of interest, through an approach to generating situationally determined recommendations, based on an understanding of how and why contextual factors influence music selection in everyday life. 

Bio: 

Noah is a postdoctoral researcher in the Music Cognition Group at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. His research involves investigating the functions of music listening in everyday life, such as how and why listeners come to select the music they do when listening. In addition, Noah is also interested in the ways that a deeper empirical understanding of music selection in everyday life could help curate music listening, for example through Context-Aware Music Recommender Systems. More recently, Noah has become interested in not just how people listen to music in everyday life, but why we as people engage with music in the first place, and the role of musicality in this process. He is currently working on an NWO-OC funded project in collaboration with Prof. Henkjan Honing, Dr. Ashley Burgoyne, and Jiaxin Li to better understand the core cognitive components of musicality.