A Cyclic Interface for the Presentation of Multiple Music Files

This paper proposes a novel cyclic interface for browsing through a song database. The method, which sums multiple audio streams on a server and broadcasts only a single summed stream, allows the user to hear different parts of each audio stream by cycling through all available streams. Songs are summed into a single stream based on a combination of spectral entropy and local power of each song's waveform. Perceptual parameters of the system are determined based on experiments conducted on 20 users, for three, four, and five songs. Results illustrate that the proposed methodology requires less listening time as compared to traditional list-based interfaces when the desired audio clip is among one of the audio streams. Applications of this methodology include any search system which returns multiple audio search results, including music query by example. The proposed methodology can be used for real-time searching with an ordinary internet browser.