Summary:
Two researchers from the University of Munich, Ya-Xi Chen and Andreas Butz, conducted research in the area of music information retrieval (MIR) about integrating audio content analysis with metadata-based interfaces to create a program called MusicSim. In their paper, they address users' increasing need to browse music in more diverse ways and the difficulty that non-experts have in navigating many current music browsing interfaces. The researchers advocate active user control and feedback of the system to improve performance by integrating audio analysis in the UI and providing visual assistance to music browsing. MusicSim presents songs clustered by content similarity and is controlled by the user through mouse operations; it supports a text-search feature, playlist generation, album-art and color-coded genre visualization. The user can input feedback into the system by splitting or merging album clusters or adjusting a slider in the recluster control panel. MusicSim implements very low-level audio analysis tools like jAudio to compute similarity between songs.
MusicSim was tested by 36 study participants, over half of which found the visualization UI very useful. However, the system did have a few problems, such as a confusing graph view and the fact that genre understanding varies wildly from user to user and should be used as additional information rather than the basis for clustering.
Discussion:
I think MusicSim is a great idea that provides a good starting point for future work in music collection visualization and management. In fact, a system similar to MusicSim was proposed by my senior capstone group for our semester-long project not too long ago. We felt that users wanted as much direct interaction with their libraries as possible, and drafted a multitouch system that would utilize a large screen (thereby solving MusicSim's difficulty with the cramped graph view). The clustering functionality of MusicSim is really useful for large libraries because it can help users locate what they want more quickly, and though using album art to represent music items is a no-brainer (and not exactly the most original idea in the world) it is nevertheless demonstrably effective and easy for users to identify with.
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