Expressing Personal Interpretations of Music Collections in Spatial Hypertext

Abstract

Managing music collections often involves prioritizing explicit metadata fields, e.g. artist, album, year, in order to structure the collection on a storage device or display it in an interface. These metadata values are used because they are independent of one's interpretation of the music and, thus, equally recognizable for all users. This paper presents a study of how people develop interpretive organizations for music in spatial hypertext. The resulting organizations included a variety of personal interpretations that drew from participants' knowledge of songs, memories associated with songs, and assessment of the mood of songs. Participants valued the expressive capabilities of spatial hypertext but missed the metadata-based tree views of the music collections for locating music.