It becomes a mind boggling situation when you are in a mood for lunch and dinner, but don’t know which place to dine, and you have probably dined in the same restaurant almost every occasion, which eventually becomes a first world problem. Therefore, the folks have IPC Shopping Centre has released a feature in its app called ‘The Mood Menu’, which connects to your Spotify account and detects the playlist, using ‘a complex proprietary algorithm’ to decide the mood you are in and suggests a few restaurants you should visit within the mall.
The feature is created in collaboration with world-renowned taste psychologist Professor Robin Dando of Cornell University, and using Spotify’s rich user data, create a food and mood matching tool to suggest the type of food the user should be taking. As Professor Dando puts it, taste perception can be modulate by a variety of factors and includes our emotional response to pleasant and unpleasant real life events. Hence, we assume the same can be applied to music as well, for instance you will listen to energetic music when your day is good, or listen to some slow music when you had a long day, the Mood Menu detects that to decide if you are in a happy or sad mood.
Even though there isn’t a simple explanation on how the match-making of the restaurants are being done, based on my tests I got a hit for a few ‘Happy Mood’ restaurants as I was previously listening to some fast music, but I can’t relate how places like Ah Cheng Laksa or Absolute Thai can be a place I would like to go if I’m in a happy mood. If you would like to try out, the IPC Shopping Centre app is available as a free download on Google Play and App Store.
