Comments on: Building a music map

By: Einführung in die Genre-Klassifikation von Musikzimmer « musikzimmer.ch blog

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:18:42 +0000

[...] zu anderen Genre Maps: Tigersushi, Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, washedashore, Musicmachinery, Digitalmusiccollector, Kubanische Musik, [...]

By: moi

moi — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:46:27 +0000

I found the same idea years ago on http://www.pandora.com The music genoma proyect, but later they banned ip’s outside United States. Still can’t guess why.
Anybody knows a way to enter the site anymay, or a similar one, not being musicovery.com ?

Thanks
moi

By: zazi

zazi — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:09:08 +0000

Too much information is presented on the vizualisations (sample maps) @Ethan. Keep it simple, or us colors for differentiation. It not easy to navigate to such an amount of information.
In general the complexity of music is a mess in visualisation, but we cannot influence the music in its magic.

Cheers

zazi

By: plamere

plamere — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:50:15 +0000

Ethan: Small world - I'm preparing a talk on using visualizations for music discovery and just last weekend I stumbled upon your michael jackson sample map on your blog - I'm planning on incorporating a shot of that map in the talk (along with the wired timeline for the girl talk song that I'm sure you've seen. Your visualizations are cool stuff.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:39:57 +0000

I enjoyed reading this quite a bit. I’ve been wrestling with some of the same challenges trying to visualize the use of samples by hip-hop and electronica artists. You and your readers might enjoy seeing what I’ve come up with.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethanhein/sets/72157619582100697/detail/

By: plamere

plamere — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:08:51 +0000

@Varun – the pdf works for me. I’m on a mac using ‘preview’ – I think others have been able to view it as well. Maybe it is not downoading to your machine properly? The file size should be 323,357 bytes.

By: Varun

Varun — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:15:05 +0000

I’m sorry to post such a menial comment to an otherwise intelligent and provocative discussion, but when I download the general-2k.pdf file, I get nothing but white–there is no text or image whatsoever; only empty white space. I can zoom in or out, but still, only white. Does anyone else have this problem? Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers

By: Nemo

Nemo — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:40:39 +0000

“But the purpose of these graphs is to build music maps of artist space, not so much building playlists of individual songs.”

True – if you only consider artist space. I think (and it’s purely instinct) that a map of songspace will provide means for playlist generation (next song = nearest song to current song which is in the “direction” you wish to travel), as well as creating maps of both artist and genrespace.

I see it that the ‘song’ is the basic atomic unit being dealt with, with artists being an abstraction in one direction, and genres being an abstraction in another. If those abstractions can be balanced, I think the result will be useable and relevant for all purposes. (afterall, tracking the congruency of a certain artist to a certain genre, and comparing that to other artists with similar congruency – is my understanding of the origin of the idea as blogged. :) I think this is what you were saying in your other comment? (damn the limited level of nested replies! :)

I’m not familiar with the APIs noted however, so I’m afraid that is going over my head, beyond what is deducable from the feature names – which looks good.

By: zazi

zazi — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:07:25 +0000

It is nice to see a music map built on musical content, but what makes it different to applications like this one http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/?
The genre definition and categorisation is another problem. In my opinion a current state-of-the-art there are multiple weighted genres for artists, albums (track collections) and tracks are neccessary and useful and should be derived from different sources (e.g. collaborative filtering, expert categorisation, web sources and content analysis), which should also be weighted in a certain manner. Last but not least, these weights should be adjust to the user interests, which are analysed and stored in the user profile.
I think visualisations like Anita’s MusicBox and similar ones are going in the right direction to deal with huge music collections.

By: Garg

Garg — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:28:52 +0000

I had a browse through my old data structures textbook and it turns out I was wrong about the genres necessarily returning ghastly bowls of spaghetti.

Since you want tagging on a track-by-track basis, each track ought to fit more readily into a specific genre than a particular artist might. Broadly speaking, artists also tend to stick to the specific genres. This means the sets are mostly disjoint, ie a reggae artist will be in the reggae genre set despite the odd dub adventure and will overwhelmingly not crop up in the black metal genre set.

It is thus possible to solve our dynamic equivalence problem with a disjoint-set data structure (for either playlists or for a souped up music map).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint_set_data_structure

My hunch is it would work better for the playlist scenario than the music map scenario, because side projects etc tend to genre hop, but it means there appears to be a way to integrate genres with 2 minute noodles instead of bowls of spaghetti.