Content-based music indexing and organization

While electronic music archives are gaining popularity, access to and navigation within these archives is usually limited to text-based queries or manually predefined genre category browsing. We present a system that automatically organizes a music collection according to the perceived sound similarity resembling genres or styles of music. Audio signals are processed according to psychoacoustic models to obtain a time-invariant representation of its characteristics. Subsequent clustering provides an intuitive interface where similar pieces of music are grouped together on a map display.