User-Aware Music Retrieval

Personalized and user-aware systems for retrieving multimedia items are becoming increasingly important as the amount of available multimedia data has been spiraling. A personalized system is one that incorporates information about the user into its data processing part (e.g., a particular user taste for a movie genre). A context-aware system, in contrast, takes into account dynamic aspects of the user context when processing the data (e.g., location and time where/when a user issues a query). Today's user-adaptive systems often incorporate both aspects. Particularly focusing on the music domain, this article gives an overview of different aspects we deem important to build personalized music retrieval systems. In this vein, we first give an overview of factors that influence the human perception of music. We then propose and discuss various requirements for a personalized, user-aware music retrieval system. Eventually, the state-of-the-art in building such systems is reviewed, taking in particular aspects of "similarity" and "serendipity" into account.