Designing Games with a Purpose for Data Collection in Music Research. Emotify and Hooked: Two Case Studies

Collecting ground truth data for music research requires large amounts of time and money. To avoid these costs, researchers are now trying to collect information through online multiplayer games with the underlying purpose of collecting scientific data. In this paper we present two case studies of such games created for data collection in music information retrieval (MIR): Emotify, for emotional annotation of music, and Hooked, for studying musical catchiness. In addition to the basic requirement of scientific validity, both applications address essential development and design issues, for example, acquiring licensed music or employing popular social frameworks. As such, we hope that they may serve as blueprints for the development of future serious games, not only for music but also for other humanistic domains. The pilot launch of these two games showed that their models are capable of engaging participants and supporting large-scale empirical research.