Predicting Musical Sophistication from Music Listening Behaviors: A Preliminary Study

TL;DR

This study explores how online music listening behaviors relate to musical sophistication and demonstrates that such behaviors can be used to predict users' musical sophistication levels.

Contribution

It introduces a preliminary analysis linking listening behaviors to musical sophistication and shows the potential for psychological models in user behavior prediction.

Findings

Listening behaviors can predict musical sophistication.

Psychological models offer advantages over purely data-driven methods.

Preliminary results support further research in this area.

Abstract

Psychological models are increasingly being used to explain online behavioral traces. Aside from the commonly used personality traits as a general user model, more domain dependent models are gaining attention. The use of domain dependent psychological models allows for more fine-grained identification of behaviors and provide a deeper understanding behind the occurrence of those behaviors. Understanding behaviors based on psychological models can provide an advantage over data-driven approaches. For example, relying on psychological models allow for ways to personalize when data is scarce. In this preliminary work we look at the relation between users' musical sophistication and their online music listening behaviors and to what extent we can successfully predict musical sophistication. An analysis of data from a study with 61 participants shows that listening behaviors can successfully be used to infer users' musical sophistication.