An Innovative Three-Dimensional User Interface for Exploring Music Collections Enriched with Meta-Information from the Web
Peter Knees, Markus Schedl, Tim Pohle, Gerhard Widmer · 2006
We present a novel, innovative user interface to music repos-itories. Given an arbitrary collection of digital music files, our system creates a virtual landscape which allows the user to freely navigate in this collection. This is accomplished by automatically extracting features from the audio signal and training a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) on them to form clusters of similar sounding pieces of music. Subsequently, a Smoothed Data Histogram (SDH) is calculated on the SOM and interpreted as a three-dimensional height profile. This height profile is visualized as a three-dimensional is-land landscape containing the pieces of music. While moving through the terrain, the closest sounds with respect to the listener’s current position can be heard. This is realized by anisotropic auralization using a 5.1 surround sound model. Additionally, we incorporate knowledge extracted automat-ically from the web to enrich the landscape with semantic information. More precisely, we display words and related images that describe the heard music on the landscape to support the exploration.