This document discusses how people search for and experience music online based on emotional responses rather than just bibliographic information. It describes a study analyzing 150 fan-created YouTube cover videos of the U2 song "Song for Someone" to understand how the videos conveyed emotion through visual and audio elements as well as user comments. The study found the videos expressed deep personal connections to the song and band through facial expressions, surroundings, and intertextual references. It concludes systems are needed to index and describe non-textual works like music based on emotional responses to help people find content that aligns with their moods and well-being.
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Searching for the right feelings: Emotional metadata in music
1. Searching for the right feelings:
Emotional metadata in music
Dr Diane Rasmussen Pennington
Lecturer in Information Science
Course Director, MSc Info. & Library Studies
University of Strathclyde
diane.pennington@strath.ac.uk
@infogamerist
2. About me: music, music
librarianship, cataloguing, and
technology
3. How do people look for music online?
Name of the artist?
Name of the song?
Name of the album?
These are all bibliographic-based
searches but what if you want to look for
something that puts you in a good mood?
5. Types of information; ways of finding
Information professionals tend to think of online
information as a textual document residing in a
database that meets a users need or query based
on bibliographic descriptions that cataloguers provide
Information comes in many forms
bodily, such as pain (Yates, 2015)
photographs, videos, music (Rasmussen Neal, 2012)
matter and energy (Bates, 2006)
Looking at us as a species that exists physically,
biologically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually, it is
not unreasonable to guess that we absorb perhaps 80
percent of all our knowledge through simply being
aware, being conscious and sentient in our social
context and physical environment (Bates, 2003)
7. Some of my other prior research into
emotional information in music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-dYNttdgl0 v.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8ekz_CSBVg
Difficult to agree on emotion in music; we
respond to music individually, but some
musical facets are consistent, like slow songs
in a minor key sounding sad or heavy metal
sounding angry
Emotional tags in music
Online music recommender systems do not
cross genres (but probably should)
8. Rasmussen Pennington, D. (2016). The most passionate
cover Ive seen: Emotional information in fan-created U2
music videos. Journal of Documentation, 72(3), 569-590.
Source:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Bono_U2_
360_Tour_2011.jpg/220px-Bono_U2_360_Tour_2011.jpg
10. Watch this video. How does it make you
feel? What might the producer have been
trying to convey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQCsvlrgcn4
11. Theoretical framework
Basic emotions from fields such as cognition,
psychology, music therapy (Ekman, 1992)
Emotional Information Retrieval (EmIR)
Domains of fandom and aca-fandom (Stein &
Busse, 2009; Bennett, 2014)
Online participatory culture, such as writing fan
fiction or making cover versions of videos for loved
songs (Jenkins, 2013)
U2 academic studies (U2conference.com)
Intertextuality as a practice in online participatory
culture among fans (Vernallis, 2013)
12. Methods and sample
Discourse analysis, a method for qualitatively
analysing language and other forms of
communication (Budd & Raber, 1996;
Iedema, 2003); applied to intertextuality
To analyse the emotional information
conveyed in 150 YouTube cover videos of
U2s Song for Someone by:
The producers (people who made the videos)
The consumers (people who watched the videos)
Through the videos themselves, producers
descriptions, consumers comments and
likes/dislikes on the videos
14. Types of videos created by producers
Cover versions
Original versions of the song with new
visual content
Tutorials on how to play the song
Videos showed deep, personal
involvement with the song and the band
28. So this song is a memory that lasts, an idea that
comes from another place that cannot be explained
simply as things that happen can be, because there is
no reason to forget what had still not enough [sic].
was awaken [sic] by the last three lines []
and I fell in love [] It is amazing how one part of a
song can call out to you and make
you want to listen to it over and over again
Producers comments and
descriptions
29. Quality of the cover version
Excellent performance [] even makes me appreciates
U2s version considerably greater, as your acoustic guitar
and incredibly sincere raw, emotionally gifted vocal
capabilities emphasize the song with pure soul & heart
Starts slow, but you get really good (passionate.)
Really, really amazing. You give me chills, everytime.
Emotional impact of the song
Sometimes things happen in your life and you have no
control, and a song just brings you to tears and makes
things ok.
Beautiful song. Intense meaning.
Omg this song makes me melt every time I hear it.
Una canzone piena di emozioni (Italian for a song full of
emotions)
Responses from consumers: more likes
than dislikes; almost all positive
30. Producers: tenderness, facial expressions,
surroundings, musical elements, textual
descriptions, U2 intertextuality
Consumers: likes, positive comments
Conversations between producers and
consumers indicated social
constructionism of emotion among fans
But also individual reactions to the song
Discussion: expression of emotion
32. Moving forward
We need to design systems for description that
accommodate more than just
keywords/bibliographic records
No full text inherent in music or other non-textual
document: indexing problem
Account for not only emotion, but also socially
constructed and individually experienced
emotional responses to items
Ultimate goals: help people find things in
meaningful ways and even potentially contribute to
well-being as in music therapy (Hanser, 2010)
How can this all be encapsulated?
33. Lookin for a sound thats gonna drown out
the world: Resolving musical emotional
ambiguity in U2s POPVision
Source: http://u2conference.com/u2-con-2018-program/
June 2018: U2CON2018, Belfast
35. References
Bates, M. J. (2003). Toward an integrated model of information seeking and searching. Retrieved from
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/info_SeekSearch-i-030329.html
Bates, M. J. (2006). Fundamental forms of information. Journal for the American Society of Information
Science and Technology, 66(10), 2071-2084.
Bennett, L. (2014). Tracing textual poachers: Reflections on the development of fan studies and
digital fandom. Journal of Fandom Studies, 2(1), 5-20.
Budd, J.M., & Raber, D. (1996). Discourse analysis: Method and application in the study of information.
Information Processing & Management, 32(2), 217-226.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3-4), 169-200.
Hanser, S. B. (2010). Music, health, and well-being. In P. N. Juslin and J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of
music and emotion (pp. 849-877). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multisemiotic
practice, Visual Communication, 2(1), 29-57.
Jenkins, H. (2013). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge.
Neal, D. M. (2010). Emotion-based tags in photographic documents: The interplay of text, image, and
social influence. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 34(3), 329-353.
Rasmussen Neal, D. (Ed.) (2012). Indexing and retrieval of non-text information. Berlin: De Gruyter Saur.
Rasmussen Pennington, D. (2016). The most passionate cover Ive seen: Emotional information in fan-
created U2 music videos. Journal of Documentation, 72(3), 569-590.
Stein, L., & Busse, K. (2009). Limit play: Fan authorship between source text, intertext, and context.
Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 7(4), 192-207.
Vernallis, C. (2013). Unruly media: YouTube, music video, and the new digital cinema. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Yates, C. (2015). Exploring variation in the ways of experiencing health information literacy: A
phenomenographic study. Library & Information Science Research, 37, 220-227.