An Explorative, Hierarchical User Interface to Structured Music Repositories
Markus Schedl · 2003
Due to efficient compression algorithms like MP3, the number and size of digital music repositories have increased dramatically over the past few years. Consequently, the demand for obtaining digital music from the Internet has been rising. Hence, effective methods for finding pieces of music in such repositories are becoming more and more important. Unfortunately, when working with traditional user interfaces which solely provide text-based search, the user already has to know certain textual properties of the songs he/she is looking for (e.g. name of the artist or album). In contrast, the prototype of the user interface which has been developed by the author is based on graphical visualizations of musical similarities between the pieces contained in the repository. This enables the user to exploratively browse through the collection, an approach which is especially useful for discovering formerly unknown pieces of music. In order to provide different views of the music collection, two algorithms were chosen to process the audio signals. These algorithms measure musical similarities according to rhythmic and timbral properties. The developed user interface “ViSMuC ” (Visualization of Structured Music Collections) implements an artificial intelligence method called Aligned Self-Organizing Maps in which high-dimensional data is represented by a 2-dimensional map. The pieces of music are visualized according to an adjustable weighting of their rhythmic