Quote Surfing in Music and Movies with an Emotional Flavor
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Quote Surfing in Music and Movies with an Emotional Flavor Vasco Serra and Teresa Chambel LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal [email protected], [email protected] Keywords: Songs, Lyrics, Movies, Quotes, Time, Memory, Emotions, Explore, Compare, Interactive Media Access, Synchronicity and Serendipity. Abstract: We all go through the situation where we listen to a movie or a song lyrics quote and without giving it much thought, immediately know where it comes from, like an instant and often emotional memory. It is also very common to be in the opposite scenario where we try hard to remember where we know these words from, want to discover, and also find it interesting to see them quoted in different contexts. These situations remind us of the importance of quotes in movies and music, that sometimes get more popular than the movie or song they belong to. In fact, quotes, music and movies are among the contents that we most treasure, for their emotional impact and the power to entertain and inspire us. In this paper, we present the motivation and the interactive support for quotes in As Music Goes By, giving users a chance of searching and surfing quotes in music and movies. Users can find, explore and compare related contents, and access quotes in a contextualized way in the movies or song lyrics where they appear. The preliminary user evaluation results, focusing on perceived usefulness, usability and user experience, were very encouraging, proving the concept, informing refinements and new developments, already being addressed. Users valued most the search, navigation, contextualization and emotional flavor: to be able to access and compare quotes in movies and in lyrics, to navigate across movies and songs, the emotional dimension and representation also for quotes. Future work will lead us further with the focus on rich, flexible and contextualized interactive access to quotes, music and movies, aiming for increased understanding of their meaning and relations, chances for serendipitous discoveries and to get inspired and moved by these media that we treasure. 1 INTRODUCTION with overt emotional messages. Lyrics play a relevant role in conveying emotions in songs, tending to Quotes have been treasured and used since a long emphasize the negative (like sad and angry) and to time, and they come from different sources and detract from the more positive ones (like happy and contexts. It is common that people identify calm), although melodies are often more donimant themselves with certain lyrics or quotes, inspiring or than lyrics in eliciting emotions (Ali and reminding them of personal experiences. People Peynircioğlu, 2006). Chou et al. (2010) demonstrated remember quotes and their origin when they induce the relevance of song lyrics in music advertising, strong emotions (Flintlock, 2017; Jenkins, 2014). finding that previously heard old songs have positive Phrases that tend to become popular and quotes effects by evoking good moods or favorable nostalgia (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., 2012) often use less thoughts, adding to the idea that songs can be very common words but common syntactic patterns, and impactful, with the potencial of altering the behavior work in many different scenarios, making them of listeners (Dickens, 1998). “portable” or quotable. The context in which a phrase Movies are also very impactful (Oliveira et al., is proffered can greatly influence its degree of 2013). In fact, music and movies have a significant memorability, making it relevant to provide users presence and impact in our lives and they have been with the opportunity to access quotes in their original playing together since the early days of cinema, even context, like in songs and movies. in silent movies (almost always accompanied by live People value music primarily because of the music on piano or small orchestras), allowing to emotions it evokes (Juslin and Vastfjall, 2008), and convey a shared meaning, strongly by their lyrics and music is often accompanied by lyrics that tell stories subtitles, often quoted and significant to many people. But this relation of music and movies has not been BrainQuote: love, art, nature, funny, and many other much explored in media access. topics; while LouiseHay is more focused on: In our previous work, MovieClouds (Chambel et forgiveness, happiness, health, love, inspiration, etc.). al., 2013) allowed to access, explore and watch But most of these sites do not include many quotes movies based on their content, mainly in audio and from movies or songs, and though in topics one may subtitles, and with a focus on emotions expressed in find e.g. movies, then quotes are usually about, not the subtitles, in the mood of the music, and felt by the from, movies. Next approaches are more focused on users. Subtitles were processed and sincronized with songs and movies, usually in separate. movie watching, but for the songs, we focused on Many quotes come from song lyrics. In the old mood based on the audio, not on lyrics. In As Music days listeners got lyrics from listening to songs, but it Goes By (Moreira and Chambel, 2019), the aim is to became increasingly common to publish the lyrics in access and explore music in versions (or covers) and records sleves or booklets, and several authors and movies where they appear along time, also with a fans already publish songs in videos that present the focus on emotional impact. Now, as described in this lyrics as the video plays. But to make them more paper, it is being enriched with support for quotes in available and searcheable for a vast number of songs, both music and movies, allowing to find, explore and there are some lyrics-dedicated websites or platforms compare relevant related contents, and to access, since the early 2000s, and even Google displays lyrics watch and listen to them in context, with the ability to in searches for songs or lyrics, since 2014, using inform and inspire us. We hypothesized that this Google Play. From the early days, e.g. AZLyrics support for quotes, their contextualized access in (.com) allows to browse by artist and to search by free movies and lyrics, and their emotional dimention are text, getting results organized by artist, album and relevant to have, and went on researching, designing song; and a special section dedicated to soundtracks. and testing. MetroLyrics (.com) has a similar purpose, but has The paper discusses the motivation, relevance and evolved to include more information like top songs, means for accessing quotes in the context of music videos and news about songs and artists, and allow and movies. It describes the background of related users to add meaning. In Songmeanings (.com), users and previous work in section 2, and presents the contribute with lyrics and discuss interpretations. support we are designing and developing for quotes People tend to find meaning in lyrics and enjoy in As Music Goes By interactive web application in knowing the authors’ and other people perspectives. section 3. A preliminary user evaluation is presented Genius (.com), possibly the world's biggest collection next, followed by conclusions and future work. of lyrics and musical knowledge, supports song meaning from users and artists. With a closer connection with the actual song, 2 BACKGROUND Musixmatch (.com) supports lyrics translations, having extensions to also synchronize lyrics with Quotes have been treasured and used since a long music for Youtube, Spotify among others, aligned time. With the advent of the web, sites have appeared with research that has been carried out in this area (Wang et al., 2004). Whereas approaches like Shazam to make them available, based on curators or user contributions. Brainyquote (.com) e.g. rely on (.com) process audio content to discover a song given curators to select quotations and collections to its audio, in situations where a song is playing and a user wants to find out the name, the lyrics and the inspire, motivate and entertain, with the aim to create a rewarding experience to their users. Their quotes artist, and more recently supporting TV programs and adds. Besides this practical benefit of music have historical, political or cultural relevance, others identification, Typke et al. (2005) already identified are for fun, coming from diverse contexts and often by famous people. Goodreads(.com) is more that finding musical scores similar to a query could help musicologists find out how composers influence especialized in quotes from literature. Other more specific quotes appear e.g. in the context of self- one another or how their works are related to earlier development with the aim to inspire and help people works of their own or by other artists. In a related perspective, relying on textual on their path, such as the case of louisehay(.com) presenting Louise Hay’s affirmation (quote) of the analysis of lyrics, Logan et al. (2004) described a tool day and providing access to many more, presented in to characterize songs semantics and determine artist similarities, concluding that it was better than random different visual styles to help convey their mood. The concept of quote of the day is also adopted in the but inferior to acoustic similarity. LyricsRadar previous sites, and some have categories (e.g. (Sasaki et al., 2014) is a more recent lyric retrieval system that enables users to browse song lyrics by through similar quotes and experiencing them in the analyzing their topics, taking into account the context context the music and movies they appear in. This can in which words are used (e.g. “tears” can be of help them really understand what these quotes mean, sadness or joy) to help users navigate to lyrics of and may surprise them with unexpected coincidences interest. and discoveries in serendipitous moments.