Talk presented at the Colour/Blind session at Chi 2007, San Jose, CA. Abstract: The movement of music from physical discs to digital resources managed on a computer has had an effect on the listening habits of users. We explore using the potential of the innate synaesthesia that some people report feeling between colour and mood in a novel interface that enables a user to explore their music collection and create musical playlists in a more relevant way. We show that there is a reasonable degree of consistency between users’ associations of colour and music, and show that an indirect descriptor can aid in the recall of music via mood, making playlist generation a simpler and more useful process.

2. When you think of Tuesday, do you think of Orange?

3. The Problem “ the music player should learn my music taste and help me select the right music for the moment. Something fresh in the morning, something smooth in the evening...”

4. Doing this in iTunes

10. Choice of Media Player

13. Workflow: Tagging Music User Listens to Synaesthesia Tag Applied Colour Association

18. “Feels Like It Should”

19. What Does This Mean? Orange: Sunshine, enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, stimulation Purple: Ambition, wisdom, creativity and magic. a very artificial colour

20. “Killing Time”

21. Red: Energy, danger, courage, power, passion and desire Black: Power, elegance, death, evil and mystery

22. “This Love”

23. Red-orange: Pleasure , aggression , action Light Red: Joy, sensitivity and love

24. Comments “ For 2 of the songs a colour came straight away and it was quite clear”

25. “ I'm always happy when I have a good DJ, who plays songs that I like at this moment... So, choosing songs of 'similar colour' could be helpful...”

26. “ I only use playlists excessively because itunes doesn't have a good enough inbuilt way of organising my music by mood”

27. “ i think that there may be a problem with the user being inconsistent with how they associate their music with colours, especially if you consider that they'll be doing this over the lifetime of the application ”

28. “ I love the idea. But if this is the only means to play music then it may be too restrictive.”

29. “ ...I strongly believe that there is no intrinsic property in music that suggests color. This would be subjective and change even for a given person from situation to situation. Any association of color is external to the music itself...”

30. Movements and Colour “ suites of classical music often consist of movements of varying 'colour' - one peaceful movement, one dramatic one, etc. For an example listen to the New World Symphony by Dvorak.”

37. Performance: Merging Playlists Secs Subject

39. Reasons for Colour Selection

41. Questions? Michael Voong and Russell BealeUniversity of Birmingham, UK www.colourplayer.com