Islands of Music Analysis, Organization, and Visualization of Music Archives

Islands of Music are a graphical user interface to music collections based on a metaphor of geographic maps, where islands represent music genres. Similar genres are located close to each other and the pieces of music are located accordingly. Islands of Music are intended to support the exploration of unknown music collections. The user can listen to the music by clicking on its representation on the map and can explore island after island according to his or her musical taste. Islands of Music could be utilized by music stores to assist their customers in finding something new to buy. They could also serve as interfaces to digital music libraries, or they could simply be used to organize one’s personal music collection at home. My thesis explores two main aspects related to music maps. One is how to compute the similarity of two pieces of music, so a whole music collection can be organized accordingly. The second aspect is how to present this information to the user in an intuitive way. The methods are illustrated and evaluated using a music collection consisting of 359 popular pieces from different genres with a total length of about 23 hours. This report briefly reviews related work in Section 2 and then presents the basic architecture of the system in Section 3. The results are briefly demonstrated in Section 4. Finally, in Section 5 some conclusions are drawn.