Animation
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.