I finally had the time (and the computer!) to put together a demo video of MusicBox. This video, more than the others on this site, shows a wide range of features, all from the most recent version of the software. I hope you find it a helpful introduction to my thesis project. [Go to the video: QuickTime | YouTube (Note the HD version!)]
As always, I welcome your questions and feedback!
Yesterday I set up the MusicBox to animate transitions as you enable or disable features. I took a short video of this: it starts with no features enabled, and I go through each feature (or set of features; they are enabled in blocks together, like all allmusic.com tags at once), adding it, and you can see the shape of the musical space change as those features’ influence are added and subtracted.
The program is recalculating the space after every change, by performing a new principal components analysis, and then displaying all the tracks in their new locations.
Click image to view QuickTime movie (14.2 MB).
The animation isn’t perfect, specifically because the scale can change dramatically when feature sets are changed, and I didn’t interpolate that properly (it’s too complicated given the way I’ve written my code… blech, lesson learned). But it still gives a good sense of how each song is moving throughout the changing space.
I showed Paul this video (13 MB) last week, but really anyone should be able to see it. The interface is changing every day, so it doesn’t look the same as this now, but this video shows: