Visualization in Audio-Based Music Information Retrieval
Matthew L. Cooper, Jonathan T. Foote, Elias Pampalk, George Tzanetakis · Computer Music Journal · 2006
Music information retrieval (MIR) is an emerging research area that explores how music stored digitally can be effectively organized, searched, retrieved, and browsed. The explosive growth of online music distribution, portable music players, and lowering costs of recording indicate that in the near future, most of the recorded music in human history will be available digitally. MIR is steadily growing as a research area, as can be evidenced by the international conference on music information retrieval (ISMIR) series (soon in its sixth year) and the increasing number of MIR-related publications in Computer Music Journal and other journals and conference proceedings. Designing and developing visualization tools for effectively interacting with large music collections is the main topic of this overview article. Connecting visual information with music and sound has fascinated composers, artists, and painters for a long time. Rapid advances in computer performance have enabled a variety of creative endeavors to connect image and sound, ranging from simple direct renderings of spectrograms popular in software music players to elaborate real-time interactive systems with three-dimensional graphics. Most existing tools and interfaces that use visual representations of audio/music such as audio editors treat audio as a monolithic block of digital samples without any information regarding its content. The systems described in this overview are characterized by the fact that they attempt to visually represent higher-level information about the content of music. MIR is a new field, and visualization for MIR is still in its infancy; therefore we believe that this article provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in this area and will inspire other researchers to contribute new ideas.