New mobile tech makes music to suit moods

Computer scientists and musicologists at the University of Oslo have developed new software that lets music lovers add their own personal touch to their music.

Kristian Nymoen at the university's Department of Informatics said to Forskning.no: “With the new system you can use your smartphone and your movements to control how modern compositions sound. The composer’s task is to create a music landscape with a lot of musical soundscapes. Then you control which soundscapes you want to move between, and you can also decide yourself the routes you want to take within the various sound landscapes.”

Put more simply, your phone, with special unique sensors built into it, can detect how you are moving, determine from your movements your mood, and alter the type of music you're listening to to either enhance or help change it.

For example, if you are feeling happy and high energy the technology would select music to go along with that mood. But say you were moving negatively as a result of feeling low, the smartphone would then select mood-lifting sounds to return you to a happy state.

All smartphones already have inbuilt sensors that recognize movement.

“The way you move can give some indication about your mood. When you’re in a good mood you move in a different way from when you’re in a bad mood. So we want technology to sense what you are like as a person and to facilitate for you to get what you want for your current frame of mind,” Nymoen says.