Poolcasting is an intelligent technique to customise musical sequences for groups of listeners. Poolcasting acts like a disc jockey, determining and delivering songs that satisfy its audience. Poolcasting additionally ensures that the played sequence does not repeat the same songs or artists closely and that pairs of consecutive songs ‘flow’ well one after the other, in a musical sense.

The thesis describes the poolcasting technique as well as Poolcasting Web radio, an innovative online radio system that broadcasts music programmes customised in real time for their listeners. A set of experiments are reported that evaluate how much the size of the group and its musical homogeneity affect the performance of poolcasting.

UAB (06/11/2009)