MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections

Back in the saddle

Argh, getting back to normalcy now, much later than I’d anticipated.  I’ve been in Austin and Taiwan, then back to Boston, over the last couple of weeks, and although I’ve been busy, it hasn’t been with thesis-related stuff specifically.

But now, I’m back to work for good, ready to crank hard and consistently until I finish in May.

Today I met Takuya Fujishima, of Yamaha, and talked with him about soundsieve and my thesis project.  He’s a very interesting guy, completely on top of the work going on in MIR — he specifically mentioned Paul (Lamere) and Elias Pampalk when I was talking to him about my project. He also suggested I look into the work of these Japanese researchers:

• Masataka Goto — worked with Elias Pampalk on MusicSun and MusicRainbow
• Keiichiro Hoashi
• Kazuyoshi Yoshii — “An Efficient Hybrid Music Recommender System Using an Incrementally Trainable Probabilistic Generative Model”

This is certainly a good start in getting back to reading relevant papers. I’m definitely curious to know if there are must-read papers/people that I should take a look at. I’m interested in these topics specifically:

• interfaces for music browsing and recommendation
• multidimensional analysis
• audio features that are commonly used to discriminate between different styles/genres
• projects that combine audio analysis with contextual descriptors
• commentary on what makes an “appropriate” music database (how to have it as unbiased as possible?)
• interface design for 3D spaces

I found these lists of MIR-related papers/dissertations, and will look through them:

• Donald Byrd’s “A Personal Music IR and Music Informatics Bibliography”
• Elias Pampalk’s “PhD Theses and Doctoral Dissertations Related to Music Information Retrieval”

As far as actual work is concerned, I am focusing for the next few days on truly defining the intended scope of my project and creating a plan for the programming I have to do. More on that soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:08 pm and is filed under papers, background. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.