BIuetunA: Let Your Neighbour Know

What Music You Like

Abstract
BluetunA is an application running on Bluetooth-
enabled mobile phones that allows users to share
information about their favourite music. With BluetunA
people can select a list of favourite artists or songs and
see who else in proximity share their taste in music, or
they can search whom nearby has selected specific
artists, and check out what other preferences in terms
of music these people have. Moreover, BluetunA users
can exchange messages with each other over
Bluetooth, connect to the Internet to download their
profile and obtain music recommendations from Last.fm
website. To enrich this experience, people can interact
with each other through their mobile phones while
sitting in cafes by accessing the BluetunA hotspots and
a wider range of music sharing options.

Keywords
Mobile music, metadata sharing, Bluetooth applications,
proximity-based interactions, social awareness.

ACM Classification
Design, Human Factors
H.5 Information Interfaces and Presentation (I.7)
H5.1. Multimedia Information Systems
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2007, April 28-May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.
ACM 978-1-59593-642-4/07/0004.
Stephan Baumann
DFKI GmbH / Competence Center
Computational Culture
Erwin Schrdinger Str 57
67657 Kaiserslautern
Germany
stephan.baumann@dfki.de

Arianna Bassoli
Media and Communications
The London School of Economics
and Political Science
London,
UK
a.bassoli@lse.ac.uk

Bjrn Jung
bjoern.jung@dfki.de

Martin Wisniowski
mw@khm.de

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The power of (meta) data
The recent success of social network websites
(MySpace), online music recommendations (Last.fm),
picture sharing (Flickr) and bookmarks sharing
(Del.icio.us) has been supported by peoples desire to
share information about themselves and their personal
interests. More than a proper sharing of content, many
of these systems are based on the sharing of metadata,
which provide information about the content itself. By
searching specific keywords, I can now find specific
pictures, or songs, or preferences selected by other
people that are subscribed to the same system I use,
would it be Flickr, Last.FM or other. Although this
massive sharing of personal information is mainly
Internet-based and relies on a fixed and centralised
infrastructure, other network technologies are
increasingly allowing people to perform a more
distributed and dynamic communication using their
mobile devices. WiFi and Bluetooth are wireless
technologies which already allow, at least in theory,
people to share personal data without having to access
services provided by current operators. Short-range
wireless technologies have the peculiarity of being able
to connect only people who are in proximity; this gives
the opportunity to people to communicate with others
(friends or strangers) who share the same physical
space at any given time. Moreover, mobile phones and
other mobile devices that have already reached mass
consumption are increasingly acquiring the power and
complexity of small computers, and this is slowly
changing their role within the consumers society.

To create applications that allow people to
communicate and exchange data over mobile phones is
now in the hands of designers/developers, for whom it
is still non-trivial to build new programs that can run on
a variety of mobile phone models. Beside these
technical problems we foresee a multitude of open
research issues concerning the socio-cultural
embedding of technology-mediated interaction
patterns. While prominent researchers in the domain of
human-computer interaction have tackled those
problems [1], mainly specific market-oriented [2] as
well as ethnographic studies [3] have highlighted how
cultural differences play a major role in this field. Just
to name a few, anthropomorphised angst, junior elites
and open- vs. back vs. closed-door cultures are social
phenomena being either reinforced by mobile
technology or representing major barriers for certain
use cases.

Facing these challenges, researchers are currently
suggesting new ideas and prototypes that are building
a new generation of mobile phones applications able to
support the personal sharing of information. As part of
this community of researchers, we are suggesting a
system that operates on Bluetooth-enabled mobile
phones, and that allows people to share information
about their music preferences. BluetunA represents the
follow up of the tunA project, originally developed at
Media Lab Europe. tunA [4] was a pioneer system in
the field of mobile music technology, combining aspects
of music sharing on the move and mutual awareness of
people in physical proximity. tunA was designed for
people to access each others playlists when in WiFi
range, to listen to other peoples music in a
synchronised way, to chat and finally to keep a list of
bookmarks containing songs and users encountered on
the way. While tunA was developed on WiFi-enabled
PDAs, we now chose to use Bluetooth because of the
high penetration of this short-range wireless connection
which is built-in various new models of mobile phones.
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Moreover, mobile phones also have a higher
penetration compared to PDAs. While tunA allowed the
streaming of music between devices, BluetunA is
mainly based on the exchange of music metadata and
not of music files.

Related work
Apart from tunA, other mobile music systems have
been developed for research purpose. SoundPryer [5] is
a software running on WiFi-enabled PDAs that has been
designed for sharing music between cars. Push!Music
[6], running on PDAs as well, relies on agents to
provide people in range with music recommendations
and allows users to deliberately send to others their
music files. The MobileMusicMessenger of the Potato
System [7] is a commercial approach which allows
users to download, recommend and resell music via
their mobile phone. It is part of the general Potato
framework which introduced super-distribution of digital
content as a means for motivating artists and users to
join commercial download scenarios.

Compared to these systems, BluetunA is not focused
primarily on the sharing of music content. We believe
that often the exchange of music information is
sufficient for supporting peoples habit of talking with
peers in order to enrich their music knowledge. Also,
BluetunA represents a lightweight application aimed at
increasing peoples awareness of their surrounding.

Bluetooth all around you
Although Bluetooth presents some disadvantages
(limited range, transfer rate, security) compared to
other wireless technologies, its main attraction is the
penetration it has recently reached. Most of the latest
models of mobile phones come, in fact, with Bluetooth
built-in. In addition to this it offers two unique features:
transmission of digital items or metadata is free of
charge and the transmission is not regulated by an ISP
or a telco.

Originally developed to connect and manage devices in
short range, it is mostly left unused by most people
because of the lack of applications that rely on it. It is
not clear how people might use Bluetooth in their
everyday routine (if not to connect to their computers);
however, when scanning for Bluetooth devices in
western cities, it is very common to find few of them in
range.

Researchers involved in the Cityware project conducted
a pilot study through which they found that
approximately 10% of people walking on the streets of
Bath, Uk, had their Bluetooth turned on [8]. An
informal Bluetooth scanning that was performed by us
periodically in the London Underground highlighted that
a similar percentage of people had Bluetooth turned on
while travelling, among which approximately 30% had
given nicknames to their devices.

Nicknames probably constitute the minimum amount of
personal information that people are willing to let
others in proximity access. While it seems unlikely that
someone would broadcast to strangers other personal
details such as mail or email address and even pictures,
people could be inclined to share their music
preferences with others nearby, as it is a less intrusive
way to communicate aspects of their identity.
Participants of our tunA qualitative user study
demonstrated, for instance, to be highly inclined to let
strangers in proximity access information about the
music they have in their playlist and to use alias to

Figure 1: person listening to
music from his mobile phone in
the crowded London Tube

Figure 2: what is your neighbour
listening to?
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broadcast their presence; on the other hand, they
expressed the fear of letting strangers know other
details of their identity or current location.

Music Proximity
BluetunA could constitute a starting point for letting
people gain more control over their "Bluetooth
presence, by making them more aware of what it
means to broadcast aspects of their identity to co-
proximal people in public places, the same way they
already do through clothing and gestures. If we think
about concerts, either open-air or in dedicated clubs or
halls, the user is already embracing a specific music-
related context. We recently started a second informal
study trying to evaluate such environments in relation
to objective measures such as size of the location,
number of visitors and the affinity to technology
regarding the presented music genre. Since we know
that there are some psycho-sociological relations
between music listeners and their preferred music
genres [9, 10] we may detect extensions to such work
which started decades ago in the human sciences.
There has been some recent research in the area of
Music Information Retrieval (MIR) considering situation-
specific mood or emotional underpinnings while
listening to music (e.g. D.Hurons listening modes).
Nevertheless there is still a lack of quantitative
research about the concrete influence of different
contexts (time, space, environment, etc.) and their
trajectories to the perception of music by individuals
and the way they socialise through music.

BluetunA-on-the-go
When travelling in the London Underground it is almost
impossible not to spot the crew of iPOD users, but it is
also not uncommon to see people listening to music on
their mobile phones. Owners of mobile phones with MP3
capabilities are seen as the main target group for
BluetunA, especially young people who decide to use or
carry around these multifunctional devices instead of
dedicated MP3 players such as iPODs. In a variety of
everyday occasions, BluetunA could provide an
interesting and engaging experience for all music lovers.
For instance, if I feel like I want to listen to something
new, I can receive music recommendation on the move
by accessing services provided by Last.FM. Alternatively,
I can connect to others in proximity and run a search for
artists they know who might make music similar to the
one I already like. If I see someone sitting close to me
who looks interesting, and I become suddenly curious to
know his/ her taste in music, I can fulfil this curiosity by
checking his/ her list of favourites. In case I feel bored
waiting at the airport, I can see who else among the
people waiting around me has similar music taste to
mine. If I see that someone who has music that Ive
heard of but Im not sure about, I can send him/ her a
message asking what he/ she thinks about it.

In order to select my favourite music, I can have
BluetunA create an automated list based on the MP3s
that are already contained in my mobile phone.
Alternatively, I can access Last.FM and download from
there my profile, which makes my list of favourites be
less ad hoc but more long term. There could be benefits
in each of these two options; because this list
represents my music identity that others in proximity
can access, I can chose if I want them to know what I
am listening to these days, or if I want them to know
what my preferences are over a longer period of time.
Whenever I search for other BluetunA users, I receive a
list that shows them with their nicknames and different
icons that are created by the application to show if they


Figure 4: BluetunA
screenshot: main menu and
my favourites

Figure 3: person scanning the
neighborhood with Bluescan
(http://mobile.processing.org)
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are friends, total strangers, or people whom I dont
know but have already crossed my path a certain
number of times (familiar strangers). To search for
people in proximity who might have music that interest
me, I can select a number of keywords that are kept in
my search list and run an automated search
periodically, or I can perform a custom search in case
Im looking for something in particular at a certain
time. Depending on the number of songs others have of
the artists I searched for, I will receive a list where
BluetunA users are displayed in order of their matching
rate. I can then choose to browse the list of favourites
of the people BluetunA found in range, and to send
them a message in case I need clarifications.

Details of the BluetunA Prototype
BluetunA has been prototyped in J2ME, the Java2
Platform, Micro Edition. The MIDP2.0 profile was used
and the extensions JSR-75 and JSR-82. The JSR-75 is
used to access the phones file system, especially the
mp3s. The implementation had to be optimized in order
to keep it small and efficient. For practical reasons a lot
of the standard packages, e.g. for XML parsing, have
been too complex. We decided to use plain text instead
of XML-based formats. A central plain text parser was
implemented for the message handling and the
interpretation of the external profiles delivered by
Last.FM. The components interact by using a compact
message format for data exchange.

The matching algorithm as contained in Bluetuna-on-
the-go is a lightweight version of heuristic AI-based
matching strategies. Basically it is computing a
weighted sum of the normalized local matchings
between: my.searchterms and your.MP3.ID3tags, my.
favouriteartists and your.favourite artists.
The application consists of a Java Archive
(BluetunA.jar) and a Java Application Descriptor
(BluetunA.jad); depending on the device only the .jar
or both files are required. It has been tested so far with
Nokia 6230i and Nokia 3250. We plan to offer the
required files for the most popular models of different
manufacturers on our project website for public
download.

BluetunA-hotspot
Although BluetunA has been designed for a mobile
audience, we have also envisioned a scenario where
people are sitting in a caf and have time to exchange
music information with others. In these situations,
BluetunA can take advantage of a fixed infrastructure,
providing a higher degree of complexity and reliability
at the same time. We are currently implementing a
BluetunA server which acts as an open relay to
BluetunA clients at urban hot spots. Moreover, we are
working on a client application which is browser-based,
and therefore accessible to all models of mobile
phones. The server and the thin clients comprise the
BluetunA-hotspot system, offering a more transparent
P2P style of interaction, which implies that offering and
searching for music and people can be done at the
same time. Having the relay server in the background
makes it now possible to run advanced global similarity
measures including semantic representations of content
and users as well as content-based audio descriptions.
For research purposes, a central caching and traffic
logging will finally allow for data mining.


Future Plans
As Kjeldskov and Graham [11] pointed out, "mobility is
very difficult to emulate in a laboratory setting, as is

Figure 5: BluetunA user communicating
with another user in proximity and
connecting online to Last.FM website.

Figure 6: BluetunA gives the possibility
to see on a mobile phone how people in
proximity represent their identity in
terms of their music preferences
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the dynamism of changing context. Field studies offer
the ideal opportunity for the study of rich real-world
use cases. We want to test the application by
providing 20 students with mobile phones where
BluetunA has been installed for a period of 30 days.
Participants will be asked to use the application on a
regular basis, as this will show the progress of users
getting acquainted with the features and interface of
the application, and the evolution of usage over time.

A combination of qualitative (collected through diaries
and in-depth interviews) and quantitative (collected
through logs) data will highlight the main positive and
negative aspects of BluetunA in terms of usability,
desirability, entertainment, awareness of the
surroundings, increase in social interactions and in
music knowledge. Finally, the results of the study will
serve as a feedback to the designers/ developers for
planning iterations of the design process.


Acknowledgments
Arianna Bassoli wishes to thank the former tunA-team
at Media Lab Europe.

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