Research on how people experience music emphasizes the importance of exploration and diversity in listening. However, music recommender systems struggle with facilitating exploration. Even when music recommender systems are able to recommend something valuable to users that is outside their typical preferences, it still remains difficult to spark their interest. This paper presents a user study examining the efficacy of immersive and informative introductions in stimulating interest in songs that are beyond one's usual preferences, an experience called Taste-Broadening Serendipity. We uncover two important mechanisms behind the effect of introductions: transportation and cognitive elaboration. Our findings indicate that transportation (i.e., being absorbed into a narrative world) is the strongest predictor of Taste-Broadening Serendipity, while cognitive elaboration (i.e., learning something new about the artist or social context in which the music emerged) has a weaker effect but is easier to stimulate. We propose that song introductions can play an important role in facilitating exploration and increasing diversity of listening on music streaming platforms.

翻译：关于人们如何体验音乐的研究强调了聆听中探索与多样性的重要性。然而，音乐推荐系统在促进探索方面面临挑战。即使音乐推荐系统能够向用户推荐其通常偏好之外的有价值内容，仍难以激发其兴趣。本文通过用户研究，考察沉浸式与信息性介绍在激发对超出个人通常偏好歌曲的兴趣方面的效果——这种体验被称为"拓宽品味的意外发现"。我们揭示了介绍效果背后的两种重要机制：传输与认知精化。研究结果表明，传输（即沉浸于叙事世界）是"拓宽品味的意外发现"的最强预测因子，而认知精化（即学习关于艺术家或音乐产生的社会背景的新信息）效果较弱但更易激发。我们提出，歌曲介绍可以在促进音乐流媒体平台的探索及增加聆听多样性方面发挥重要作用。