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

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 an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MM
• Authors: Peter Knees, Markus Schedl, Tim Pohle, Gerhard Widmer
• Keywords: Height Profile, MM 2006, Three-dimensional Height Profile, Three-dimensional Island Landscape