Music Recommendor System 2022-23

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 OVERVIEW

Rapid development of mobile devices and internet has made possible for us to access different
music resources freely. The number of songs available exceeds the listening capacity of single
individual. People sometimes feel difficult to choose from millions of songs. Moreover, music
service providers need an efficient way to manage songs and help their costumers to discover music
by giving quality recommendation. Thus, there is a strong need of a good recommendation system.
Currently, there are many music streaming services, like Pandora, Spotify, etc. which are working
on building high-precision commercial music recommendation systems. These companies generate
revenue by helping their customers discover relevant music and charging them for the quality of
their recommendation service. Thus, there is a strong thriving market for good music
recommendation systems.
Music recommender system is a system which learns from the users past listening history and
recommends them songs which they would probably like to hear in future. We have implemented
various algorithms to try to build an effective recommender system. We firstly implemented
popularity based model which was quite simple and intuitive. Collaborative filtering algorithms
which predict (filtering) taste of a user by collecting preferences and tastes from many other users
(collaborating) is also implemented. We have also done experiments on content based models,
based on latent factors and metadata.
However, the problem now is to organise and manage the million of music titles produced by
society. MIR techniques have been developed to solve problems such as genre classification [42,
75], artist identification [46], and instrument recognition [49]. Since 2005, an annual evaluation
event called Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX1 ) is held to facilitate the
development of MIR algorithms. Additionally, music recommender is to help users filter and
discover songs according to their tastes. A good music recommender system should be able to
automatically detect preferences and generate playlists accordingly. Meanwhile, the development
of recommender systems provides a great opportunity for industry to aggregate the users who are
interested in music. More importantly, it raises challenges for us to better understand and model
users’ preferences in music.

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Currently, based on users’ listening behaviour and historical ratings, collaborative filtering
algorithm has been found to perform well. Combined with the use of content-based model, the user
can get a list of similar songs by low-level acoustic features such as rhythm, pitch or high-level
features like genre, instrument etc. Music recommender systems (MRS) have been adopted by
industry to assist listeners in navigating the catalogs of available music recordings and to serve
them with suggestions of items that may fit the respective user's preferences. Today, MRS have
become a significant research area Also music industry establishes research teams dedicated to the
topic, because MRS are important drivers for their businesses.

1.2 PURPOSE

Music recommender systems have become an essential means to help users deal with
content and choice overload as they assist users in searching, sorting, and filtering these extensive
music collections. Simultaneously, both music listeners and artists benefit from the employed
segmentation and personalization approaches that are typically leveraged in music recommendation
approaches. we focus on music consumers who listen to music beyond the mainstream (i.e., users
who listen to non-popular music) in the music streaming platform. In contrast, music consumers
who listen to popular music seem to get better recommendations.

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE SURVEY

2.1 LITERATURE SURVEY

Paper 1: Music Recommender System

This is a project of our Artificial Intelligence course. We find it is very good as we got a
chance to practice theories that we have learnt in the course, to do some implementation and to try
to get a better understanding of a real artificial intelligence problem: Music Recommender System.
There are many different approaches to this problem and we get to know some algorithms in detail
and especially the four models that we have explained in the paper. By manipulating the dataset,
changing the learning set and testing set, changing some parameters of the problem and analyzing
the result, we earn a lot practicing skills.
We also got to realize that building a recommender system is not a trivial task. The fact that
its large scale dataset makes it difficult in many aspects. Firstly, recommending 500 correct songs
out of 380 million for different users is not an easy task to get a high precision. Thats why we didnt
get any result better than 10 %. Even the Kaggle winner has only got 17 %. Secondly, the metadata
includes huge information and when exploring it, it is difficult to extract relevant features for song.
Thirdly, technically speaking, processing such a huge dataset is memory and CPU intensive. All
these difficulties due to the data and to the system itself make it more challenging and also more
attractive. We hope that we will get other opportunities in the future to work in the domain of
artificial intelligence.

Paper 2: A Survey of Music Recommendation Systems and Future

Perspectives

In this paper, we explain a basic metadata-based model and two popular music
recommender approaches: collaborative filtering and content-based model. Though they have
achieved great success, their drawbacks such as popularity bias and human efforts are obvious.
Moreover, the use of hybrid model would outperform a single model since it incorporates the
advantages of both methods. Its complexity is not fully studied yet. Designing a personalised music
recommender is complicated, and it is challenging to thoroughly understand the users’

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needs and meet their requirements. As discussed above, the future research direction will be mainly
focused on user-centric music recommender systems.
A survey among athletes showed practitioners in sport and exercise environments tend to
select music in a rather arbitrary manner without full consideration of its motivational
characteristics. Therefore, future music recommender should be able to lead the users reasonably
choose music. To the end, we are hoping that through this study we can build the bridge among
isolated research in all the other disciplines.

2.2 EXISTING SYSTEM

Along with the rapid expansion of digital music formats, managing and searching for songs
has become significant. Though music information retrieval (MIR) techniques have been made
successfully in last ten years, the development of music recommender systems is still at a very early
stage. Therefore, this paper surveys a general framework and state-of-art approaches in
recommending music. Two popular algorithms: collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based
model (CBM), have been found to perform well. Due to the relatively poor experience in finding
songs in long tail and the powerful emotional meanings in music, two user-centric approaches:
context-based model and emotion-based model, have been paid increasing attention. In this paper,
three key components in music recommender - user modelling, item profiling, and match
algorithms are discussed. Six recommendation models and four potential issues towards user
experience, are explained. However, subjective music recommendation system has not been fully
investigated. To this end, we propose a motivation-based model using the empirical studies of
human behaviour, sports education, music psychology.

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2.3 PROBLEM STATEMENT

To provide the efficient and helpful system which helps the listener to listen the music
according to their recommendations and it helps the listener by providing recommended
music list.

2.4 PROPOSED SYSTEM

Various approaches been implemented to forecast ozone depletion worldwide, but this
research will contribute by achieving the following objectives:
➢ Due to the unavailability of well-organized data source, identification of few reliable input
parameters that cause music recommendor.
➢ The creation of a precise prediction model involves identified input parameters.
➢ To achieve better results than existing techniques with the help of the proposed approach
by fine-tuning of KNN.

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CHAPTER 3

IMPLEMENTATION

3.1 DATA

We used data provided by Million Song Data Challenge hosted by Kaggle. It was released
by Columbia University Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio.
The data is open; meta-data, audio content analysis, etc. are available for all the songs. It is also
very large and contains around 48 million (userid, songid, play count) triplets collected from
histories of over one million users and metadata (280 GB) of millions of songs. But the users are
anonymous here and thus information about their demography and timestamps of listening events
is not available. The feedback is implicit as play-count is given instead of explicit ratings. The
contest was to predict one half of the listening histories of 11,000 users by training their other half
and full listening history of other one million users. Since, processing of such a large dataset is
highly memory and CPU-intensive, we used validation set as our main data. It consists of
10,000,000 triplets of 10000 users. We used metadata of only 10,000 songs (around 3GB). From
the huge amount of song metadata, we focus only on features that seem to be most relevant in
characterizing a song. We decided that information like year, duration, hotness, danceability, etc.
may distinguish a song most from other songs. To increase processing speed, we converted user
and song ids from strings to integer number.

3.2 ALGORITHMS
KNN Model
In this method, we utilize the available metadata. We create a space of songs according to
their features from metadata and find out neighborhood of each song. We choose some of the
available features (e.g., loudness, genre, mode, etc.) which we found most relevant to distinguish a
song from others. After creating the feature space, to recommend songs to the users, we look at
each users profile and suggest songs which are neighbors to the songs present in his listening
history. We have taken top 50 neighbors of each song.
This model is quite personalized and uses metadata. But since, we had 280GB file of
metadata which takes huge amount of time in processing, we extracted features of only 3GB
(10,000 songs), which is less than 2 % of total number. Due to this, we had features of only small
number of songs, which gives us very small precision.

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SVD Model
Listening histories are influenced by a set of factors specific to the domain (e.g. genre,artist).
These factors are in general not at all obvious and we need to infer those so called latent factors
from the data. Users and songs are characterized by latent factors. Here, to handle such a large
amount of data, we build a sparse matrix from user-song triplets and directly operate on the matrix
[Figure 3], instead of looping over millions of songs and users. We used truncated SVD for
didimensionalityeduction. We used SVD algorithm in this model as follows: Firstly, we decompose
Matrix M into latent feature space that relates user to songs. M = U PV , where M Rm∗n, Um∗k ,
Pk∗k and V k∗n.
Here, U represents user factors and V represents item factors. Then, for each user, a
personalized recommendation is givn by ranking following item for each song as follows Wi = U
T u .Vi Though the theory behind SVD is quite compelling, there is not enough data for the
algorithm to arrive at a good prediction. The median number of songs in a users play count history
is fourteen to fifteen; this sparseness does not allow the SVD objective function to converge to a
global optimum.

Figure 3.1: Item Based

In item-based model [Figure1], it is assumed that songs that are often listened together by
some users tend to be similar and are more likely to be listened together in future also by some
other user.

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According to user-based similarity model [Figure2], users who have similar listening
histories, i.e., have listened to the same songs in the past tend to have similar interests and will
probably listen to the same songs in future too. We need some similarity measure to compare
between two songs or between two users. Cosine similarity weighs each of the users equally which
is usually not the case. User should be weighted less if he has shown interests to many variety of
items (it shows that either she does not discern between songs based on their quality, or just likes
to explore). Likewise, user is weighted more if listens to very limited set of songs. The similarity
measure, wij = P( i/j ), also has drawbacks that some songs which are listened more by users have
higher similarity values not because they are similar and listened together but because they are
more popular.

Figure 3.2: User Based

This determines how individual scoring components affects the overall scoring between two
items. The similar things are emphasized more while less similar ones contribution drop down to
zero. After computing user-based and item-based lists, we used stochastic aggregation to combine
them. This is done by randomly choosing one of them according to their probability distribution
and then recommending top scored items from them. When the song history of a user is too small
to utilize the user-based recommendation algorithm, we can offer recommendations based on song
similarity, which yields better results when number of songs is smaller than that of users.

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CHAPTER 4

METHODOLOGY

First Step - User Profile Modelling

The user profile can be categorised into three domains: demographic, geographic,
andpsychographicc (shown in Table 1). Based on the steadiness, psychological data has been
further divided into stable attributes which are essential in making a long term prediction and fluid
attributes which can change on an hour to hour basis.

Second Step - User Listening Experience Modelling

Depending on the level of music expertise, their expectations in music are varied
accordingly. Jennings analysed the different types of listeners whose age range from 16-45 and
categorised the listeners into four groups: savent, enthusiasts, casuals, indifferents (see Table 2).

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This information gives us a good example that their expertise needs to be considered when
designing user-oriented recommendation systems. For instance, based on their expectation, we
need to consider the amount of music to be discovered and filtered in long tail which represents
interesting and unknown music but hidden in the tail of the popularity curve. Other user information
including access pattern, listening behaviour are also useful for user modelling and dynamic
optimisation. Exploring user information can be either done through the initial survey or observing
their behaviour of music in long tail.

Item Profiling
The second component of recommender systems is music item. It defines a various of
information that used in MIR. In 2005, Pachet classified the music metadata into three categories:
editorial metadata (EM), cultural metadata (CM), and acoustic metadata (AM).

– Editorial metadata:
Metadata obtained by a single expert or group of experts. This is obtained literally by the
editor, and also it can be seen as the information provided by them. E.g., the cover name, composer,
title, or genre etc.

– Cultural metadata:
Metadata obtained from the analysis of corpora of textual information, usually from the
Internet or other public sources. This information results from an analysis of emerging patterns,
categories or associations from a source of documents. E.g., Similarity between music items.

– Acoustic metadata:
Metadata obtained from an analysis of the audio signal. This should be without any
reference to a textual or prescribed information. E.g., Beat, tempo, pitch, instrument, mood etc.

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State-of-art Approaches in Music Recommendation

An ideal music recommender system should be able to automatically recommend
personalised music to human listeners. Different from books or movies, the length of a piece of
music is much shorter, and the times that listening their favourite songs are normally more than
once. The existing recommender systems such as Amazon, Ebay have gained a great success. It
can recommend complementary goods, the buyer can compare the products (new-item/old-item)
and negotiate with the sellers. However, music recommender is not only giving products with
reasonable price, but suggesting them personalised music. So far, many music discovery websites
such as Last.fm, Allmusic, Pandora, Audiobaba6, Mog7 , Musicovery 8 , Spotify9 , Apple ”Genius”
have aggregated millions of users, and the development is explosive. In this section, we present the
most popular approaches, metadata information retrieval, collaborative filtering, content-based
information retrieval, emotion-based model, context-based information retrieval and hybrid
models. At the end of each approach, their limitations are described.

Metadata Information Retrieval (Demographic-based Model)

As the most fundamental method, it is the easiest way to search for music. Metadata
information retrieval uses textual metadata (editorial information).
http://audiobaba.com/
http://www.mog.com/
http://www.musicovery.com/
http://www.spotify.com/
supplied by the creators, such as the title of the song, artist name, and lyrics to find the target songs.

Emotion-based Model
Music as a self-expression tool, it always performs with affection. Rich in content and
expressivity [86], the conventional approaches for music information retrieval are no longer
sufficient. Music emotion has appealed lots of research and it has become the main trend for music
discovery and recommendation . A commercial web service called ‘Musicovery’ uses the
fundamental emotion model (2D valence-arousal) found by psychologists. It allows users to locate
their expected perceived emotion in a 2D space: valence (how positive or negative) and arousal
(how exciting or calming). Similar to content-based model, the emotion perception is associated
with different patterns of acoustic cues [6, 35, 48, 61]. Different perceptual features

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such as energy, rhythm, temporal, spectral, and harmony have been widely used in emotion
recognition.

Playlist Generation
Another issue is the sequence of the playlist [38]. Most of the recommender systems are not
flexible, because the playlist is ordered by the similarity distance between seed songs. Though the
most similar songs are given in order, the theme and mood can be dramatically changed in between.
This may result in the dissatisfaction and discontinuation of the songs. Research indicates that a
playlist should have a main theme (mood, event, activity) evolve with time. Rather than randomly
shuffling, human skipping behaviour can be considered for dynamic playlist generation. For
example, assuming that the users dislike the song when they skipped it, the system therefore,
removes the songs which are similar to the song which they skipped.

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RESULTS

We got best results for memory based collaborative filtering algorithm. Our SVD based
latent factor model gives better results than popularity-based model. It lags behind collaborative
filtering algorithm because the matrix was too sparse which prevented objective functions to
converge to global optimum. Our K-NN model did not work well and performs worse than even
the popularity model. The reason behind this is that we have the features of only 10,000 songs,
which is less than 3 % of the whole dataset so only some of these 10,000 songs could be
recommended. The huge lack of information leads to the bad performance of this method. Due to
the subjective nature in music and the issues existing in the previous methods, two human-centred
approaches are proposed. By considering affective and social information, emotion-based model
and context-based model largely improved the quality of recommendation. However, this research
is still at an early stage. Researches in psychology pointed out that music not only improves mood,
increases activation, visual and auditory imagery, but also recalls of associated films or music
videos and relieves stress. Moreover, the empirical experiments in sport mentioned that the main
benefits for listening to the music which include work output extension, performance enhancement,
and dissociation from unpleasant feelings etc. For example, athletes prefer uptempo, conventional,
intense, rebellious, energetic, and rhythmic music rather than reflective and complex music. An
important fact found by psychologists is that users’ preference in music is linked to their
personality. Also worth mentioning that fast, upbeat music produces a stimulative effect whereas
slow, while soft music produces a sedative effect. All of these highlight that music recommender
is not only a tool for relaxing, but also acts as an effective tool to meet our needs under different
contexts.

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CONCLUSION

This is a project of our Artificial Intelligence course. We find it is very good as we got a
chance to practice theories that we have learnt in the course, to do some implementation and to try
to get a better understanding of a real artificial intelligence problem: Music Recommender System.
There are many different approaches to this problem and we get to know some algorithms in detail
and especially the four models that weve explained in the paper. By manipulating the dataset,
changing the learning set and testing set, changing some parameters of the problem and analyzing
the result, we earn a lot practicing skills. We have faced a lot of problem in dealing with this huge
dataset, how to explore it in a better way and we also had difficulties in some programming details.
However, with lot of efforts, we have overcome all of these. The best part of this project is the
teamwork. Both of us come from different countries and thus have different cultures and ways of
working. We took a bit of time to get to know each other, to adjust ourselves and to perform like a
team. We become much more efficient by the time the team spirit is formed and we also enjoy
more. We both find this project a nice experience and all the effort put is worthy. We have learnt a
lot from this project.

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FUTURE SCOPE

[1] Develop more recommendation algorithms based on different data (e.g. the how the user is
feeling, social recommendation, etc).
[2] Combine different methods and learn the weightage for each method according to the
dataset.
[3] Automatically generate relevant features.
[4] Music is a form of performing art, and it is extremely tough to become a professional
musician.

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REFERENCES

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➢ C Anderson. The Long Tail. Why the Future of Business is selling less of more. Hyperion
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➢ Luke Barrington, Reid Oda, and G. Lanckriet. Smarter Than Genius? Human Evaluation of
Music Recommender Systems. In 10th International Society for Music Information
Retrieval Conference, number ISMIR, pages 357–362, 2009.
➢ McFee, B., BertinMahieux,T., Ellis, D. P., Lanckriet, G. R. (2012, April). The million song
dataset challenge. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World
Wide Web (pp. 909916).ACM.
➢ G. Adomavicius and A. Tuzhilin. Toward the Next Generation of Recommender Systems:
A Survey of the State-of-the-art and Possible Extensions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge
and Data engineering, June 2005.

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