Music Machinery

Album art has always been a big part of music. It is designed to catch your eye in a record store, and also perhaps to give you a hint as to what kind of music is inside.  Music Information Retrieval scientists Jānis Lībeks and Douglas Turnbull from Swathmore are interested in learning more about how much information an album cover can give you about the music.  They are conducting a simple study – they present the participants with a set of album art and the participants try to guess the genre of the artist based only upon what they see.  It’s the genre identification task that uses album art as the feature set.

Anyone can participate in the study, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes – and its fun to look at an album cover and try to guess what’s inside.  I’m looking forward to seeing the results of the study when they publish.

Participate in the study