Interactive Exploration of Music Listening Histories

Over the past years, music listening histories have become easily accessible due to the expansion of online lifelogging services. These histories represent the sequence of songs listen by users over time. Although this data contains intrinsic users' tastes and listening behaviors, it has been mainly used to personalize recommendations. Tools to help users exploring and reasoning about the information contained in the listening history, only recently have started to emerge. In this paper we describe a new visualization and exploration tool that allows users to interactively browse their listening histories, while leading them to identify listening trends and habits. Our solution combines a rich-featured timeline-based visualization, a set of synchronized-views and an interactive filtering mechanism to provide a flexible, effective and easy to use system for the analysis and knowledge exploration of listening histories. This was complemented with brushing and highlighting techniques to uncover listening trends about artists, albums and songs. Experimental evaluation with users revealed that they were able to complete all the requested tasks with a low error rate, and that they found the solution flexible and easy to use. Additionally, users were able to infer about their main life events and listening changes, which indicates that our combination of visualization techniques is effective in conveying relevant information about the listening habits.