Streamcatcher: Integrated Visualization of Music Clips and Online Audio Streams

We propose a content-based approach to explorative visualization of online audio streams (e.g., web radio streams). The visualization space is defined by prototypical instances of musical concepts taken from personal music collections. Our system shows the relation of prototypes to each other and generates an animated visualization that places representations of audio streams in the vicinity of their most similar prototypes. Both computation of music similarity and visualization are formulated for online real time performance. A software implementation of these ideas is presented and evaluated.