Majella Clarke, Senior Analytics Strategist (and Musician) at DAIN Studios, teamed up with Christian Pusch, upcoming film composer and music producer, Kevin Per, software development student at TU Wien, and Karim El Kaddioui, entrepreneur and finance specialist, to form the team Mieli. Mieli means emotion in the Finnish language. The group won the music track sponsored by Universal Music Studios Austria at the 2018 Vienna Waves Music Festival Hackday.
The team worked with Facebook’s Augmented Reality Studio using face tracker to track emotional responses of the face of Happy and Angry, depending on facial muscle movement. Using data from Universal Music Studios API, the Mieli script would make a recommendation of the top seven artists based on user emotion. The Mieli script links the downloader profile personality with the artist, with the augmented reality facial emotion recognized by the user. The user of Mieli can shake their head at their phone to indicate “no”, and the script will make another recommendation for an artist that appeals to the emotional state. The user can also nod their head to indicate “yes”, and the song by the artist recommended will start to play. It is a novel new way of generating recommended artists linked with real time emotional response using facial recognition technology from the listener, unlike the current song/artist recommendation algorithms that use past listening and/or click data to generate recommendations.
The Music Hackday was held in Vienna as part of the 2018 Vienna Waves Music Festival. The event was sponsored by Universal Music Studios, Facebook and Semaf Electronics. 14 teams participated in 2018 in different tracks that used technology to explore the possibilities of experimental music and technology driven music innovation.
