LoopLens: Supporting Search as Creation in Loop-Based Music Composition

Creativity support tools (CSTs) typically frame search as information retrieval, yet in practices like electronic dance music production, search serves as a creative medium for collage-style composition. To address this gap, we present LoopLens, a research probe for loop-based music composition that visualizes audio search results to support creative foraging and assembling. We evaluated LoopLens in a within-subject user study with 16 participants of diverse musical domain expertise, performing both open-ended (divergent) and goal-directed (convergent) tasks. Our results reveal a clear behavioral split: participants with domain expertise leveraged multimodal cues to quickly exploit a narrow set of loops, while those without domain knowledge relied primarily on audio impressions, engaging in broad exploration often constrained by limited musical vocabulary for query formulation. This behavioral dichotomy provides a new lens for understanding the balance between exploration and exploitation in creative search and offers clear design implications for supporting vocabulary-independent discovery in future CSTs.