receiver magazine      #22 | Seizing the moment

Maria Håkansson is a researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) and the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm. She has just completed a PhD in Man-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University with a thesis on designing playful mobile media applications.  Before joining SICS, she worked for several years in the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, mainly in the areas of mobile media and ubiquitous computing, where she took a user and experience centred approach to design.  With the project Push!Music, Håkansson has explored how mobile technologies not only let us stay in touch, but can also increase our awareness of what is happening right here, right now. In her receiver contribution, she lets us see how music could be shared playfully and spontaneously with mobiles – acting on or benefiting from people's immediate surroundings.

Website: http://www.viktoria.se/~mariah/
Mobile Life Centre

Illustration by Andreas Schuster

Instead of sharing music in front of a computer, what if you could simply share songs, directly from your MP3 player, with friends and other people you encounter in your everyday life? And what if songs could send themselves autonomously from player to player, depending on where they 'fit in'? Together with my colleagues at the Future Applications Lab in Sweden, I have explored how music could be shared wirelessly between mobile devices in ways that are intended to be playful, intriguing and spontaneous. Mobile wireless technologies not only let us stay connected to those far away from us, they can also increase our awareness of what is happening right here, right now. For example, recent mobile applications let you search for apartments for sale in the same neighbourhood you are currently walking around. These technologies clearly offer great opportunities to design ways of seizing the moment – in terms of acting on or benefiting from your immediate surroundings. Therefore, in our work, we have focused on the interplay between ad hoc, connected, co-located people and the music on their devices, and how this could give rise to new experiences with mobile music – in particular, ways people could share and be inspired to discover new music when on the move.

Walkmans and iPods have allowed people to create a personal soundtrack to their everyday lives, and for some, mobile music is a constant companion (for instance when commuting). At the same time, however, such mobile technology has turned music from being a social activity into a private one. We listen in isolation from others and from what is going on around us. In fact, many practices related to music are inherently social: we ask friends to recommend new music, we dance together at clubs, some of us play in bands and we enjoy music together at concerts and festivals. On-line music recommendation applications and networks like last.fm and MySpace have exploited the sociability around the enjoyment of music in their designs and support people in finding both new music and socialising with people. But how could this work in the mobile wireless world?

Our aim was to design a playful, mobile, music sharing system, building upon the fact that we encounter other people during the day, and that such encounters could allow for novel ways of discovering music, and perhaps even encourage social interaction. Moreover, as a way of offering unpredictability as well as new inspiration, one of our main ideas was to not only let people share music, but also let songs autonomously send themselves to other players, based on how well they would fit in! By taking advantage of the dynamic qualities of a situation, we hoped to build a mobile system that would become spontaneous and serendipitous, in a way that a stationary/on-line one could not.

Some years ago, two mobile music projects, tunA and SoundPryer, had started to look at how music could be streamed like a shared radio between people who are near each other. With the autonomous sharing, we wanted to take this a step further and see how songs could actually be sent between devices as spontaneous recommendations to listen to something new. As a means to explore this, we designed, built and studied a mobile music listening and sharing application called Push!Music.

Push!Music autosharing situation and software demo on handheld

Download PDF Paper Push!Music



Taking in what surrounds you

Essentially, Push!Music is an enhanced MP3 player with wireless capabilities, that can detect other users in the vicinity and lets you wirelessly share music with them. It allows two ways of sharing music with others who happen to be nearby, and in either way the received songs end up in a pool of music where they get played one by one. You can manually send a song to another person, but as mentioned already, songs can also autonomously send themselves to other players based on what they are listening to, listening behaviour, and what songs are already on the player. This is similar to the concept of recommender systems, and is intended to add the element of surprise to the experience and inspire you to listen to more music. When using Push!Music, this might mean that walking past someone in the street who has a similar collection of music on her player, could spontaneously result in a new, automatically received song! One reason for allowing these two different ways of sharing is that while friends are often the most important and valuable way of learning about new music, recommender systems could suggest completely new things. Furthermore, Push!Music provides a minimal presence awareness of who is nearby and connected.

So how did people actually share music using a system like Push!Music? Groups of friends used it as an effortless and straightforward way of sharing music between each other, also prompting social interaction. They explained how sharing songs became a part of discussing music, and the other way around – how you could simply send the song as a memory aid, gift, tasting sample or recommendation, while you were actually talking about it. Push!Music also clearly invited a playful use, because a significant way of using it among friends was to send songs as in-jokes and pranks.

But did people manually send songs to unknown users? This happened occasionally, for example when a study participant got excited from seeing another connected user and simply sent a song as a way of saying hello. In general, however, they felt that it might be construed as too intrusive to send songs to unknown people in their vicinity. Instead, it was the autonomous sharing that excited them most. Autonomously received songs were spontaneous, serendipitous, "magical", could be viewed as gifts, and they provided inspiration to listen to something new, but they required no effort, which was looked upon as something good. As one user described one of his experiences with using Push!Music: "… I remember when I was sitting on the bus listening and then a new song appeared, which I had never heard before or even heard of, that was good. And it simply popped up, I hadn’t chosen it, but it simply appeared and I thought it was kind of good." Importantly, the autonomous sharing also allowed a way of sharing music with anyone nearby that did not hold the sender socially accountable for sending a particular song. That is, if the songs autonomously moved depending on whether they would ΄fit in΄ on the other device, the role and responsibility of the sender were diminished.

Finally, a valuable and intriguing aspect of using Push!Music was the increased awareness of nearby users that the system provided, in addition to the music. Not only was it fun to spontaneously receive music, it also added excitement to suddenly discover other connected people in the system. Who the other connected users could be became a popular topic of discussion among groups of socialising Push!Music users. One person explained what she thought was intriguing here, compared to sharing on-line: "It was more fun, I think, to have them [other users] 'live', because knowing that someone is nearby but you don't know who it is, that's more exciting! Then it's a physical person, not just a name on a display…"



Sampling new ways of sharing

In terms of technological development, a great deal has obviously happened since 2005 when we first presented Push!Music. Improved wireless network coverage and increased capacity and storage on mobile devices have radically changed the opportunities for designing and using mobile media applications. The possibilities for downloading music directly to your mobile phone have increased, along with the phone's capacity to store music. On-line applications like MySpace and last.fm exist in mobile versions, and recent music services like Spotify are probably going to be released on mobile phones in the near future. Alongside these developments, improved copyright and business models have also emerged to better meet the demands of new ways of consuming and distributing media. The first (and justified) question people would usually ask about Push!Music is whether such a system is really legal. As a research project exploring playful ways of sharing mobile music, copyright and business models were not our focus. Nevertheless, several solutions such as micro-payment and subscription models already exist, which could be suitable for mobile music sharing applications of this kind.

However, even if the preconditions have changed, there are still few examples of existing mobile music applications that exploit and absorb aspects of the mobile context – like co-located people – in a similar way to Push!Music, tunA and SoundPryer. One exception is Zune, which is a commercial, mobile music player that allows users to wirelessly share songs with other users in the vicinity, but it does not support any of the autonomous sharing that Push!Music provides. We think this lack of truly mobile music listening and sharing applications is a pity, because of their potential for encouraging new ways of consuming and sharing music. As we have learned from working on Push!Music, the chance to share music with friends here and now, as well as the spontaneous and unexpected, autonomous sharing of songs between people who happen to be near each other, definitely seem to add value to a mobile music experience.

In the future, how could mobile music sharing applications like Push!Music be developed? The mobile phone, with its integrated music player, is an obvious choice as a platform for mobile music applications since we always carry it with us. Of course, a playful and novel system like Push!Music would not replace more conventional ways of sharing music. It could, however, be used as an extra feature on your mobile phone that could provide excitement once in a while when you feel like getting some new inspiration, or that lets you send a particular song to someone. We learned from users that if Push!Music were to be a commercially available application, it should be possible to turn the autonomous sharing on or off, simply because we are not always in the mood for listening to new music. It was also clear that there should be some kind of division into an active and passive use, where the active would be only for ΄authorised΄ friends to be able to manually send songs to each other, and the passive setting would allow autonomous sharing with anyone, including strangers.

With Push!Music, we have showed how mobile wireless technologies can help take in what is happening in our immediate surroundings and thereby allow entirely new experiences of music sharing and listening. It is intriguing to think about how mobile music practices could evolve in the long run, with systems like Push!Music. Would they have an effect on what we define as our musical identity? As opposed to people's playlists in iTunes, for instance, which do not change unless the owner decides to do so, the playlists in Push!Music will, over time, consist of music from many different users. Would this give a new meaning to the personally selected playlist or personal soundtrack? A mobile sharing system like Push!Music could also potentially change how we relate to places. Perhaps meeting a friend for coffee will entail sharing some songs at the same time, which could eventually turn certain cafés, bars, and public places into places people hang out to get new music. In fact, one of the participants suggested that Push!Music could be used, in the future, to "harvest" new songs while walking around in a city. Imagine what would happen to mobile music listening and sharing if you would actually get to know different kinds of music, depending on the neighbourhood you were in at the time …



Acknowledgements: Push!Music was designed, developed and studied by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Rost, Mattias Jacobsson, and Lars Erik Holmquist at the Future Applications Lab, Sweden.


This article was written for receiver

Contact: Maria Håkansson