The availability of large music collections calls for ways to efficiently access and explore them. We present a new approach which combines descriptors derived from audio analysis with meta-information to create different views of a collection. Such views can have a focus on timbre, rhythm, artist, style or other aspects of music. For each view the pieces of music are organized on a map in such a way that similar pieces are located close to each other. The maps are visualized using an Islands of Music metaphor where islands represent groups of similar pieces. The maps are linked to each other using a new technique to align self-organizing maps. The user is able to browse the collection and explore different aspects by gradually changing focus from one view to another. We demonstrate our approach on a small collection using a meta-information-based view and two views generated from audio analysis, namely, beat periodicity as an aspect of rhythm and spectral information as an aspect of timbre.

With the advent of large musical archives the need to provide an organization of these archives becomes eminent. While artist-based organizations or title indexes may help in locating a specific piece of music, a more intuitive, genre-based organization is required to allow users to browse an archive and explore its contents. Yet, currently these organizations following musical styles have to be designed manually.

Audio-based music similarity measures can be used to automatically generate playlists or recommendations. In this paper the similarity measure that won the ISMIR’04 genre classification contest is reviewed. In addition, further improvements are presented. In particular, two new descriptors are presented and combined with two previously published similarity measures. The performance is evaluated in a series of experiments on four music collections. The evaluations are based on genre classification, assuming that very similar tracks belong to the same genre. On two collections the improvements lead to a substantial performance increase.

Manifold approaches exist for organization of music by genre and/or style. In this paper we propose the use of text categorization techniques to classify artists present on the Internet. In particular, we retrieve and analyze webpages ranked by search engines to describe artists in terms of word occurrences on related pages. To classify artists we primarily use support vector machines. We present 3 experiments in which we address the following issues. First, we study the performance of our approach compared to previous work. Second, we investigate how daily fluctuations in the Internet affect our approach. Third, on a set of 224 artists from 14 genres we study (a) how many artists are necessary to define the concept of a genre, (b) which search engines perform best, (c) how to formulate search queries best, (d) which overall performance we can expect for classification, and finally (e) how our approach is suited as a similarity measure for artists.

We present a novel, innovative user interface to music repositories. 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 island 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 automatically 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.

A Matlab toolbox implementing music similarity measures for audio is presented. The implemented measures focus on aspects related to timbre and periodicities in the signal. This paper gives an overview of the implemented functions. In particular, the basics of the similarity measures are reviewed and some visualizations are discussed. 1.

Several applications in the field of content-based interaction with music repositories rely on measures which estimate the perceived similarity of music. These applications include automatic genre recognition, playlist generation, and recommender systems. In this paper we study methods to evaluate the performance of such measures. We compare five measures which use only the information extracted from the audio signal and discuss how these measures can be evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively without resorting to large scale listening tests. 1.

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This survey paper provides an overview of content-based music information retrieval systems, both for audio and for symbolic music notation. Matching algorithms and indexing methods are briefly presented. The need for a TREC-like comparison of matching algorithms such as MIREX at ISMIR becomes clear from the high number of quite different methods which so far only have been used on different data collections. We placed the systems on a map showing the tasks and users for which they are suitable, and we find that existing content-based retrieval systems fail to cover a gap between the very general and the very specific retrieval tasks.

Nowadays, music fans are beginning to massively use mobile digital music players and dedicated software to organize and play large collections of music. In this context, users deal with huge music libraries containing thousands of tracks. Such a huge volume of music easily overwhelms users when selecting the music to listen or when organizing their collections. Music player software with visualizations based on textual lists and organizing features such as smart playlists are not really enough for helping users to efficiently manage their libraries. Thus, we propose new graphical visualizations and their associated features to allow users to better organize their personal music libraries and therefore also to ease selection later on. 1.