Exploring Music Collections in Virtual Landscapes

A user interface to music repositories called nepTune creates a virtual landscape for an arbitrary collection of digital music files, letting users freely navigate the collection. Automatically extracting features from the audio signal and clustering the music pieces accomplish this. The clustering helps generate a 3D island landscape. The rapidly growing research field of music information retrieval is developing the technological foundations for a new generation of more intelligent music devices and services. Researchers are creating algorithms for audio and music analysis, studying methods for retrieving music-related information from the Internet, and investigating scenarios for using music-related information for novel types of computer-based music services. The range of applications for such technologies is broad - from automatic music recommendation services through personalized, adaptive radio stations, to novel types of intelligent, reactive musical devices and environments.