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Toward an understanding of the history and impact of user studies in music information retrieval

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Abstract

Most Music Information Retrieval (MIR) researchers will agree that understanding users’ needs and behaviors is critical for developing a good MIR system. The number of user studies in the MIR domain has been gradually increasing since the early 2000s, reflecting this growing appreciation of the need for empirical studies of users. However, despite the growing number of user studies and the wide recognition of their importance, it is unclear how great their impact has been in the field: on how systems are developed, how evaluation tasks are created, and how MIR system developers in particular understand critical concepts such as music similarity or music mood. In this paper, we present our analysis on the growth, publication and citation patterns, topics, and design of 198 user studies. This is followed by a discussion of a number of issues/challenges in conducting MIR user studies and distributing the research results. We conclude by making recommendations to increase the visibility and impact of user studies in the field.

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Notes

  1. Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXhange (MIREX) is the annual evaluation campaign for various music information retrieval algorithms hosted by the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Lab (IMIRSEL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  2. http://www.nzdl.org/greenstone3-mir-user-study/library/collection/mir-user-study/

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Acknowledgements

We thank Gary Gao, Tiffany Huang, and Ben Farabelli at University of Washington for their valuable contributions to this project, participants of the ISMIR 2012 Conference for their helpful feedback, David Bainbridge at the University of Waikato for creating the initial Greenstone digital library of MIR user studies, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

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  1. Information School, University of Washington, Mary Gates Hall, Ste 370, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Jin Ha Lee

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, 3240, New Zealand

    Sally Jo Cunningham

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Correspondence to Jin Ha Lee.

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Lee, J.H., Cunningham, S.J. Toward an understanding of the history and impact of user studies in music information retrieval. J Intell Inf Syst 41, 499–521 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-013-0259-2

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