From Web to Map: Exploring the World of Music

Ever growing music collections ask for novel ways of organization. The traditional browsing of folder hierarchies or search by title and album tends to be insufficient to maintain an overview of a collection of orders of thousands of tracks. Methods based on song similarity offer an alternative to keyword-based search. In this work we propose to use a high-dimensional map of the "world of music" as a data structure for music retrieval and exploration of personal collections. Our approach does not require expensive analysis of audio signals and scales to hundreds of thousands of tracks. The techniques presented in this work can be used in a variety of applications, ranging from automatic DJs to file sharing on mobile devices. As a concrete example, we have developed a Web-application that allows users to visualize and navigate through their music collections and create playlists by specifying trajectories.