Abstract
A common problem in music education is finding varied and engaging material that is suitable for practising a specific musical concept or technique. At the same time, a number of large music collections are available under a Creative Commons (CC) licence (e.g. Jamendo, ccMixter), but their potential is largely untapped because of the relative obscurity of their content. In this paper, we present *Jam with Jamendo*, a web application that allows novice and expert learners of musical instruments to query songs by chord content from a large music collection, and practise the chords present in the retrieved songs by playing along. Its goal is twofold: the learners get a larger variety of practice material, while the artists receive increased exposure. We experimented with two visualisation modes. The first is a linear visualisation based on a moving time axis, the second is a circular visualisation inspired by the chromatic circle. We conducted a small-scale thinking-aloud user study with seven participants based on a hands-on practice with the web app. Through this pilot study, we obtained a qualitative understanding of the potentials and challenges of each visualisation, which will be used to inform the next design iteration of the web app.
Licence information
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Attribution 3.0 United States
