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LoopLens: Supporting Search as Creation in Loop-Based Music Composition

Sheng Long, Atsuya Kobayashi, Kei Tateno

TL;DR

LoopLens is presented, a research probe for loop-based music composition that visualizes audio search results to support creative foraging and assembling and offers clear design implications for supporting vocabulary-independent discovery in future CSTs.

Abstract

Creativity support tools (CSTs) typically frame search as information retrieval, yet in practices like electronic dance music production, search serves as a creative medium for collage-style composition. To address this gap, we present LoopLens, a research probe for loop-based music composition that visualizes audio search results to support creative foraging and assembling. We evaluated LoopLens in a within-subject user study with 16 participants of diverse musical domain expertise, performing both open-ended (divergent) and goal-directed (convergent) tasks. Our results reveal a clear behavioral split: participants with domain expertise leveraged multimodal cues to quickly exploit a narrow set of loops, while those without domain knowledge relied primarily on audio impressions, engaging in broad exploration often constrained by limited musical vocabulary for query formulation. This behavioral dichotomy provides a new lens for understanding the balance between exploration and exploitation in creative search and offers clear design implications for supporting vocabulary-independent discovery in future CSTs.

LoopLens: Supporting Search as Creation in Loop-Based Music Composition

TL;DR

LoopLens is presented, a research probe for loop-based music composition that visualizes audio search results to support creative foraging and assembling and offers clear design implications for supporting vocabulary-independent discovery in future CSTs.

Abstract

Creativity support tools (CSTs) typically frame search as information retrieval, yet in practices like electronic dance music production, search serves as a creative medium for collage-style composition. To address this gap, we present LoopLens, a research probe for loop-based music composition that visualizes audio search results to support creative foraging and assembling. We evaluated LoopLens in a within-subject user study with 16 participants of diverse musical domain expertise, performing both open-ended (divergent) and goal-directed (convergent) tasks. Our results reveal a clear behavioral split: participants with domain expertise leveraged multimodal cues to quickly exploit a narrow set of loops, while those without domain knowledge relied primarily on audio impressions, engaging in broad exploration often constrained by limited musical vocabulary for query formulation. This behavioral dichotomy provides a new lens for understanding the balance between exploration and exploitation in creative search and offers clear design implications for supporting vocabulary-independent discovery in future CSTs.
Paper Structure (50 sections, 15 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 50 sections, 15 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background & Related Work
  3. Creativity & Creativity Support Tool
  4. Models of Creative Thinking
  5. Evaluating CSTs
  6. CST for Music Composition
  7. Electronic Dance Music and Musique Concrète
  8. Visualizing Musical Structure and Repetition
  9. Search Interfaces in Commercial Digital Audio Workstations
  10. Design Principles
  11. LoopLens: System Overview
  12. Interface Overview
  13. Sample Browser
  14. Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
  15. Find Similar Modal
  16. ...and 35 more sections

Figures (15)

  • Figure 1: Example of existing radial charts and diagrams. Except the Eternal Jukebox (f), all other forms of visualizing music information takes in "nice" input formats that are not strictly audio but symbolic music notation. See Draper et al. draper2009survey for a survey on radial methods for visualization and Lima et al. lima2021survey for music visualization techniques.
  • Figure 2: Screenshots from Ableton Live 12 and Apple Logic Pro's interfaces for searching and browsing music.
  • Figure 3: Screenshot of LoopLens user interface. Note that the purple shade for DAW is manual annotation and not what the actual interface appears like.
  • Figure 4: Preview of song during drag and drop.
  • Figure 5: Screenshot of DAW in LoopLens.
  • ...and 10 more figures