Mapping Music In The Palm Of Your Hand, Explore And Discover Your Collection

The trends of miniaturization and increasing storage capabilities for portable music players made it possible to carry increasingly more music on small portable devices, but it also introduced negative consequences for the user interface and navigation. Finding music in large collections can be hard if one does not know exactly what to look for. In this paper a novel user interface to browse and navigate through music on small devices is proposed, together with the enabling algorithms. The goal of this interface is to enable the users to explore and discover their entire collection and to support nonspecific searches. To this end, a new way to visualize and navigate through music is introduced: the artist map. The artist map is designed to provide an overview of an entire music collection, or a subset thereof, by clearly visualizing the similarity between artists, computed from the music itself. Contextual information (e.g. mood, genre) is added by coloring and by attribute magnets. The artist map is implemented by a graph-drawing algorithm, which uses an improved energy model. The proposed algorithm and interface have been implemented in a prototype and will be tested with ‘real’ users.