Background Sound to Support Learning Experience

Effect of the background sounds on the performance of the cognitive tasks is widely discussed in the academic environment. Current work views background sound for learning experience in context of user-centered design approach to reveal current habits and problems and to propose a solution based on acquired information. As the first step the review of foreign literature helping with understanding of the topic and its revision from different sides of view was made as well as the review of existing solutions. After that, with the help of the user survey, current habits and needs of Russian students in context of choice of the background sound were studied. Survey results show that majority of students prefers using music from their media library or specialized playlists. As a result, the system for auto generation of the playlists for studying based on the hypothesis about the need of correspondence of music background and the learning context was proposed. The solution was created using Spotify recommender system which takes as the input a set of the audio features for the chosen by the user context (relaxation, concentration, boredom reduction). To get a better understanding of the distribution of the audio features of music for learning experience, popular Spotify playlists for studying were analyzed first. Proposed solution showed overall good results during the user evaluation and the data for future improvement was obtained.