Xanthe Lowe-Brown
PhD Candidate, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology and Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
Can (and should) AI streaming music recommendations help regulate our emotions?
I am a PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Melbourne, holding a PhD scholarship from the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE). I completed a Bachelor of Music Performance (Contemporary Guitar) at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in 2021 and my Honour's thesis on the “Individual Differences in the Experience of Musically-Evoked Chills” in 2022, supervised by Dr Solange Glasser. My interests/hobbies include travelling, attending live music gigs, baking sweet treats like cinnamon buns and walking my dog Rudy.
Working with an exceptional interdisciplinary supervision team - Dr Greg Wadley (Human-Computer Interaction), Dr Solange Glasser (Music Psychology) and A/Prof Peter Koval (Psychology), my PhD aims to explore the ethics and design space of emotion regulation features for music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. In my PhD project, I will design and evaluate an ethical, human-centred emotion-based Music Recommender System that facilitates effective emotion regulation in daily life by generating mood and personality-based playlists. Ultimately, I seek to enable highly usable interventions for music streaming services that could safely support wellbeing for over half a billion music streamers around the globe.