Towards User-Adaptive Structuring and Organization of Music Collections

We present a prototype system for organization and exploration of music archives that adapts to the user’s way of structuring music collections. Initially, a growing self-organizing map is induced that clusters the music collection. The user has then the possibility to change the location of songs on the map by simple drag-and-drop actions. Each movement of a song causes a change in the underlying similarity measure based on a quadratic optimization scheme. As a result, the location of other songs is modified as well. Experiments simulating user interaction with the system show, that during this stepwise adaptation the similarity measure indeed converges to one that captures how the user compares songs. This utimately leads to an individually adapted presentation that is intuitively understandable to the user and thus eases access to the database.