The World of Music: User Ratings; Spectral and Spherical Embeddings; Map Projections

In this paper we present an algorithm for layout and visualization of music collections based on similarities between musical artists. The core of the algorithm consists of a non-linear low dimensional embedding of a similarity graph constrained to the surface of a hyper-sphere. This approach effectively uses additional dimensions in the embedding. We derive the algorithm using a simple energy minimization procedure and show the relationships to several well known eigenvector based methods. We also describe a method for constructing a similarity graph from user ratings, as well as procedures for mapping the layout from the hyper-sphere to a 2d display. We demonstrate our techniques on Yahoo! Music user ratings data and a MusicMatch artist similarity graph. Figure 1: A partial spherical embedding of the MusicMatch similarity graph. ∗Email: [email protected]