Content-based Organization and Visualization of Music Archives

Electronic music repositories are gaining popularity as the amount of music<br> available in digital form increases rapidly. However, access to and<br> navigation within these archives is usually limited to text-based queries<br> or browsing manually predefined genre categories.<br> With the SOM-extended Jukebox (SOMeJB) we present an approach which<br> facilitates exploration of music libraries without requiring manual genre<br> classification. Given pieces of music in raw audio format we calculate<br> their perceived similarities based on psychoacoustic models. Subsequently,<br> the pieces are organized on a 2-dimensional map display so that similar<br> pieces are located close to each other. A visualization using a metaphor of<br> geographic maps provides an intuitive interface where islands resemble<br> genres or styles of music. We demonstrate the approach using a collection<br> of 359 popular pieces of music.