Work of the coordinator TU Berlin (DE) focused on the development of a general vocabulary to describe the expressive content of music and to establish prediction models for the recommendation of brand fitting in-store music. Therefore, in the first step, international experts from the respective fields were invited to a music branding expert workshop to develop a comprehensive list of words being relevant to describe music in the branding context. After shortening this list in the course of an online survey with international marketing experts, two large-scale online listening experiments with over 10,000 participants from three countries (DE, ES, UK), age cohorts, and educational backgrounds, and both genders were carried out to generate a so-called ground truth about how people perceive the expressive content of music based on their socio-demographic background. The 500 music titles used in the experiment included 10 different major genres and 61 subgenres of the music library provided by the partner HearDis! (DE). Findings from the first online experiment suggest a 4-factor structure of our vocabulary (GMBI) describing the dimensions Arousal, Valence, Authenticity, and Timeliness. Results further revealed significant effects of country, education, and gender on people’s ratings.
A second area of research, carried out by IRCAM (FR), concentrated on the development of new audio features to predict the perceived musical expression as well as to characterise the audio quality of music tracks and to improve music mixes. These features have either been derived from previously estimated higher-level concepts (such as structure, key or succession of chords) or by developing new signal processing algorithms. These regression models explain up to 80% in the variation of the musical expression as perceived by the participants of the experiments.
Investigations regarding legal frameworks in the context of audio branding as well as entailed stakeholders, which are conducted by the partner Lovemonk (ES), have been accomplished. Among other things, all 91 EU-based Collective Management Societies have been included in a survey which for the first time gives a comprehensive overview on the various different methods and payment schemes in place to date.
Key software tool developments within the project have been developed by the partners HearDis! and FINCONS (IT):
- Music Library Manager ('iTunes for professionals')
- Audio Branding Tool ('communicating the invisible')
- Playlist Generator ('sophisticated music playlists along a dramaturgy')
- Cockpit Unit ('remote control for in-store applications')
All single developments as well as the overall system were evaluated by the market research partner INTEGRAL (AT) along 80 qualitative and quantitative KPIs, as well as with the help of sensor data collected in the store of the partner Piacenza (IT).
