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.
Abstract (translated)
创意支持工具（CST）通常将搜索视为信息检索，但在如电子舞曲制作等实践中，搜索被视为一种用于拼贴式创作的创造性媒介。为解决这一差距，我们介绍了LoopLens，这是一个基于循环的音乐作曲研究探针，它通过可视化音频搜索结果来支持创造性的搜集和组装工作。我们在一项包含16名具有不同音乐领域专业知识的参与者的研究中评估了LoopLens，这些参与者在开放性（发散）任务和目标导向（收敛）任务中表现出了不同的行为模式。 我们的结果显示了一个明显的两极分化：那些拥有特定领域知识的参与者利用多模态线索快速地从有限的一组循环中提取信息；而没有相关专业知识的参与者则主要依赖于音频印象，在探索时往往因缺乏音乐词汇来构建查询而受到限制。这种行为上的二元性为理解创造性搜索中的探索与开发之间的平衡提供了一个新的视角，并对未来的CST在支持词汇无关发现的设计方面提供了明确的方向。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08571
