![]() ![]() Our reflection situates our own experiences against the landscape of relevant research findings, including those concerning playlist creation, agency and control over listening, and what psychological theories, like Uses and Gratifications theory, offer in terms of understanding listening behaviours. Both of us discuss how creating playlists and other digital interactions with music are forms of music-making, expanding upon the traditional definition of music-making and musicianship. For instance, Dr Krause recounts how she became driven to listen to her entire, vast digital music library by using the shuffle feature on an mp3 player and Dr Brown shares how his affinity for music subscription services has resulted in spending more time listening to playlists than albums. In particular, our dialogue focuses on the impact the digital revolution had on our use of emerging digital listening technologies (specifically mobile devices, playlists, and shuffle), how our practices have developed over time, and how these practices have been negotiated due to our research studies and findings. Through conversation, we reflect on and compare our personal music listening practices. Here we present a dialogue between ourselves – Dr Amanda Krause and Dr Steven Brown, two music psychology researchers, with expertise in people’s everyday music listening behaviours. A multivariate analysis through a Canonical Correlation Analysis established that expectation of music format quality drove post-listening evaluations. Some participants were told that they were listening to vinyl when the musical selection was an mp3, while others were told they were listening to an mp3 while actually listening to vinyl. Participants were asked to listen to a selection of music on either vinyl or mp3. In this study, we sought to isolate the contribution of expectation to perceived sound quality. For this reason, we believe one aspect of vinyl sales is the expectation that vinyl quality is superior. Even so, most music listeners do not reliably listen to music on audiophile quality high-end equipment. Waveforms from vinyl represent recorded music more accurately than compressed digital formats and have the potential to produce better sound. Recently, vinyl music sales have experienced a substantial resurgence. Initially, one of the primary selling features of digital music was convenience and portability rather than sound quality. While vinyl, compact discs, and even eight-track tapes were traditionally promoted to consumers as producing superior sound, the introduction of compressed digital music, such as mp3s, was markedly different. The outcome involves an extensive literature review with discussions, a methodology for the conceptualisation of implicit/explicit artefacts, an empirically derived implicit music-listening artefact, and discussions on the Explicitness of Interactions concept. This is done through a three-part Research through Design process consisting of a Contextmapping research with sensitisation and idea generation phases to which 12 design specialists partook tied into a consequential well-documented solo design phase. In this study, the goal is to design a music-listening artefact that doesn’t afford utilisation of extrinsic attributes of music to users (as opposed to modern music-listening paradigms) and through that process, to empirically discover how the qualities of information relayed by an artefact may influence the user’s subsequent actions. ![]() ![]() The same principle pertaining to how information influences user’s future actions presented itself as a theoretical notion of user experience that is applicable to interactions with all kinds of artefacts: Explicitness of Interactions. Even though it still is possible to listen to music through less information-intensive artefacts such as a radio, the advent of technology shows promise for affording a more (subjectively) meaningful experience. On the other hand, music-listening is an ephemeral experience per se, yet it became a certainty to interact with extrinsic attributes thereof as prominent music-listening platforms became saturated with information, which isn’t a bad thing in itself although, having to experience something knowledgeably can also mean forgoing certain qualities of that experience. Whereas consumption and utilisation of a vast amount of information have also become a norm for navigating through the world’s digital commodities – rendering almost every single action an informed decision. Interacting with internet-enabled artefacts has become an indispensable norm of an everyday person’s life as it can reduce otherwise demanding tasks down to a flick of a finger.
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