Spatial music collections… previous work?
Does anyone know of some projects/papers on spatially-based organization of digital music collections? I’m trying to gather information for writing my thesis’s “Background” section.
Here’s what I have so far:
- bmat’s “Similarity Maps”
- PlaySOM (Vienna University of Technology)
- Knees et. al.’s nepTune
- Leitich and Topf’s Globe of Music
- Elias Pampalk’s Islands of Music
I am going to implement a mode in my interface that is completely free-form, allowing the user to assign tracks to locations however they want. Does anyone know of projects that allow for this kind of music library organization?
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 7:53 pm
“Music in the palm of your hand” from Philips Lab allowed you to place ‘magnets’ that were associated with different musical attributes:
http://mtg.upf.edu/ismir2004/review/abstract.php?idPaper=153
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:01 pm
hannes jentsch’s interface is very nice http://www.formater.de/
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Justin Donaldson’s been doing some good visualizations with the MyStrands data.
http://labs.mystrands.com/cgi-bin/recmap.cgi
He has a good poster too:
http://blog.mystrands.com/2006/05/27/winner-winner-chicken-dinner/
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:07 pm
And of course there’s http://musicovery.com/ which has a 2D visualization of a mood space
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:08 pm
And there’s
http://www.music-map.com/weezer.html
which shows a spring model of an artist similarity space
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Masataka goto’s Musicream has some really novel interface elements:
http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/Musicream/VIDEO/ISMIR2005musicream.mpg
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 15, 2008 at 8:15 pm
fidgt lets you use tags as a magnet – but you attract users not tracks:
http://www.fidgt.com/visualize
Comment by Brooke Maury
Posted on March 16, 2008 at 1:55 pm
My Master’s thesis at the iSchool was something along these lines. It was called Orpheus. As far as I know, it was one of the earliest applications that attempted to visualize digital assets in a graph based UI. A slideshow is available here: http://arcus-associates.com/orpheus/
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 16, 2008 at 6:19 pm
There’s a blog (somewhat stale now) that has covered commercial music interfaces that’s worth a perusal.
http://musicinterfaces.com/
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 16, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Stephan Bauman gave a tutorial on music visualizations back at ISMIR 2005 – it is a little dated but still interesting:
http://ismir2005.ismir.net/documents/Baumann-ISMIR05Tutorial.pdf
Comment by Paul
Posted on March 16, 2008 at 6:59 pm
This visualization is of blogs, not music, but I think it is relevant – a high density space with lots of local groups.
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=560
Comment by Anita
Posted on March 17, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Paul, thanks a million for all these additions. Hannes Jentsch’s interface is one, in particular, that I had not seen; it is most similar to what I hope to build, except that my mapping algorithm is different (PCA instead of self-organizing map), and hopefully allows for some entirely new remappings by the user.
I definitely should have listed Paul’s own project, Search Inside The Music. Obviously related, and will be included in my thesis :)
Comment by Lisa Dalhuijsen
Posted on April 3, 2008 at 9:27 am
MusicalNodes is a project I did recently. At the moment it’s organized as follows: every album is visually attached to one or more genres. The more an album belong to a certain genre, the more it s attracted to it. The genre-‘nodes’ can be dragged around on the screen in order to get a nice ordering. It works fine, but there’s still a lot of functions to be implemented :)