RECORD

Student Project: Urørt Player

March 23, 2009 on 10:52 am | By Jørn | In Design, Student projects | No Comments

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Kjetil Austvoll-Dahlgren and Eivind Bergstøl worked on a stand-alone desktop player – based on the Adobe Air technology – for Urørt, and looked specifically into new ways of discovering new music through the desktop application.

Kjetil and Eivind also faced the problem of making visual representations of audio content. They write:

Little or next to no inherent information resides in recorded music. This limits searches for music to things such as length in time and amplitude, things which can easily be read by software and is totally uninteresting for most users.The usual practice is to add a title, artist name and a genre tag, as well as perhaps location based tags.

Though this helps a long way, we find that it is not nearly enough to make the act of searching for new music worthwhile. When looking for new music, the artist name and song title means nothing to you; and by leaning on genre descriptors you limit your findings in a far too narrow manner.

Their approach to this problem is to represent each song by a colored circle. The colors represent different sorting filters like favourites, most popular and recently uploaded. By hovering over the circle you get the name of the song and the band in addition to a sound sample. This allows for a more explorative way of navigating through the content.

Read more in their design report.