Evaluating the Usability of Browsing Songs by Mood using Visual Texture

Recently, extensive use of digital music has led to an increase in songs in online music applications and personal music libraries. In large music libraries, songs which are not listened to regularly, most probably will go unnoticed. There are many ways of browsing songs in an online music library. In the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), some type of visual forms such as colour, avatar, mood picture and album cover to visualise music, have been introduced. However, there is no research focusing explicitly on textures. To create new method of browsing music, we proposed a framework to visualise music mood using visual texture. In order to determine how well people can interact with the visual texture to browse songs in music library, usability testing was conducted. In this paper, we will present the results of the usability testing.