Graphic designers' quest for the right music

Abstract

Graphic designers often need to find suitable pieces of music for their motion graphic designs, animations, etc. Existing music collection search tools and techniques are at best only suitable for ordinary users, and lack powerful mechanisms needed by advanced users such as graphic designers when they are searching for music. To be able to develop such search systems, however, we need to better understand how graphic designers in fact formulate and carry out their search for the right music. Unfortunately very little research has been done in this area. This paper describes a pilot study which was carried out to identify some of the strategies that graphic designers adopt when searching for the music they need. Although the study was rather limited in its scope, nevertheless, it sheds some light on the largely unknown process by which graphic designers search for music.