An innovative three-dimensional user interface for exploring music collections enriched

P Knees, M Schedl, T Pohle, G Widmer - Proceedings of the 14th ACM …, 2006 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Multimedia, 2006dl.acm.org
We present a novel, innovative user interface to music repositories. Given an arbitrary
collection of digital music files, our system creates a virtual landscape which allows the user
to freely navigate in this collection. This is accomplished by automatically extracting features
from the audio signal and training a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) on them to form clusters of
similar sounding pieces of music. Subsequently, a Smoothed Data Histogram (SDH) is
calculated on the SOM and interpreted as a three-dimensional height profile. This height …
We present a novel, innovative user interface to music repositories. Given an arbitrary collection of digital music files, our system creates a virtual landscape which allows the user to freely navigate in this collection. This is accomplished by automatically extracting features from the audio signal and training a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) on them to form clusters of similar sounding pieces of music. Subsequently, a Smoothed Data Histogram (SDH) is calculated on the SOM and interpreted as a three-dimensional height profile. This height profile is visualized as a three-dimensional island landscape containing the pieces of music. While moving through the terrain, the closest sounds with respect to the listener's current position can be heard. This is realized by anisotropic auralization using a 5.1 surround sound model. Additionally, we incorporate knowledge extracted automatically from the web to enrich the landscape with semantic information. More precisely, we display words and related images that describe the heard music on the landscape to support the exploration.
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