A Color Interface for Audio Clustering Visualization

Recently, the problem of the visualization of audio contents has drawn much attention due to the increasing volume of the collections of music available on the Internet. The simplest way to display these contents is to present textual lists where each item on the list shows the attributes of the corresponding piece. However, visualizations based on textual lists are not enough to help users to efficiently explore music libraries. Different forms of alternative visualization schemes have been proposed, based on semantic attributes of pieces, or on audio information. An effective strategy for the design of interfaces accessing database contents exploits color attributes: the user is facilitated in the browsing of the database if interface colors are employed to represent some property of the audio contents. We present here an innovative strategy for the visualization of the contents of a database of audio records. The solution we propose is based on the establishment of a mapping between the acoustic features of audio clusters and colors. The database used in our implementation is that of the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Lombardy Region (AESS). The AESS was founded to preserve, study, and enhance the value of documents and images of the life, social transformations, literature, oral history, material culture, and anthropic landscapes of the Lombard territory. Its website, designed by ITC, an institute of the CNR of Milan, stores information concerning the oral history of the region, and is composed mainly of popular songs and other audio records describing the popular traditions (such as fairs, and customs) handed down from generation to generation. The AESS website implements, besides the standard functions of catalogue and search, various modalities of navigation and employ . These include, among others, the location and clustering of similar audios, that is the organization of the audio files stored in the database in groups containing files acoustically similar to each other.