Automatically Analyzing and Organizing Music Archives

We are experiencing a tremendous increase in the amount of music being made available in digital form. With the creation of large multimedia collections, however, we need to devise ways to make those collections accessible to the users. While music repositories exist today, they mostly limit access to their content to query-based retrieval of their items based on textual meta-information, with some advanced systems supporting acoustic queries. What we would like to have additionally, is a way to facilitate exploration of musical libraries. We thus need to automatically organize music according to its sound characteristics in such a way that we find similar pieces of music grouped together, allowing us to find a classical section, or a hard-rock section etc. in a music repository. In this paper we present an approach to obtain such an organization of music data based on an extension to our SOMLib digital library system for text documents. Particularly, we employ the Self-Organizing Map to create a map of a musical archive, where pieces of music with similar sound characteristics are organized next to each other on the two-dimensional map display. Locating a piece of music on the map then leaves you with related music next to it, allowing intuitive exploration of a music archive.

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