Exploiting The Importance Of Personalization When Selecting Music For Relaxation

Listening to music is not just a hobby or a leisure activity, but rather a way to achieve a specific emotional or psychological state, or even to better perform an activity, e.g., relaxation. Therefore, making the right choice of music for this purpose is fundamental. In the area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), many works try to classify, in a general way, songs that are better suited to certain activities/contexts, but there is a lack of works that seek first to answer if personalization is an essential criterion for the selection of songs in this context. Thus, in order to investigate whether personalization plays a vital role in this context, more specifically in relaxation, we: (i) analyze more than 60 thousand playlists created by more than 5 thousand users from the 8tracks platform; (ii) extract high and low-level features from the songs of these playlists; (iii) create a user perception based on these features; (iv) identify users groups by their perceptions; (v) analyze the contrasts between these groups, comparing their most relevant features. Our results help to understand how personalization is essential in the context of relaxing music, paving the way for more informed MIR systems.