Goldberg: Observations

All subjects could recognize variations they had heard before.

• After hearing the stretch variation once, Subject 1 laughed whenever it showed up again.
• When Subject 2 heard the major variation during the second iteration of the Rating interface, she knew it was the last variation from the previous iteration.
• Subject 3 thought the major and trim variations sounded familiar when they showed up on subsequent iterations.
• In the Choosing interface, subjects usually did not listen to variations with names they had already seen.

Conclusion: Users may have better musical memory than we expected. After users have heard a variation once, simple visual cues (names, for example) may be sufficient to remind them what it sounded like later on.