Content-based organization and visualization of music archives

Abstract

With Islands of Music we present a system which facilitates exploration of music libraries without requiring manual genre classification. Given pieces of music in raw audio format we estimate their perceived sound similarities based on psychoacoustic models. Subsequently, the pieces are organized on a 2-dimensional map so that similar pieces are located close to each other. A visualization using a metaphor of geographic maps provides an intuitive interface where islands resemble genres or styles of music. We demonstrate the approach using a collection of 359 pieces of music.