Sony Ericsson Developing Location Based Music Search

Many people have favourite songs that they associate with certain places such as a track to listen to when they visit their home city or a football ground. A new patent filed by Sony Ericsson could see the development of a location based music search service to bring all of our favourite tracks together into a geo-targeted version of the Top 40.

The system has been detailed in a patent filed by Sony Ericsson (manufacturers of the excellent Walkman music phones) entitled “Location dependent music search”. The patent details how users would be able to tag tracks with the locations they associate the tracks with as well as downloading songs that are associated with their current location.

Sony has a reputation of producing some innovative music phones already but offering a service that allowed users arriving in a particular new city to download a soundtrack for that city would open up a whole new world of mobile music based social networking. The best analogy of this service is the geo-tagging being offered by photo sharing site flickr.

From the patent:

A portable device may perform a location dependent music search. During the search, the portable device determines location information that identifies a location of the portable device, makes a request that includes the location information to a database, obtains a list of music sources associated with the location information from the database as a result of a search performed based on the request, selects a music source from the list, and outputs an audio signal associated with the selected music source.

Many people associate a physical location or a place to songs or pieces of music. In visiting or arriving at the place, they may remember the songs or the pieces of music and wish to hear them. They may also appreciate being supplied, automatically or after a request, information about the songs or pieces of music associated with the place.

According to one aspect, a method may comprise determining location information that identifies a location of a portable device, making a request that includes the location information to a database, obtaining a list of music sources associated with the location information from the database as a result of a search performed based on the request, selecting a music source from the list, and outputting an audio signal associated with the selected music source.

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