GRAPE: A Gradation Based Portable Visual Playlist

Thanks to recent evolution of portable music players featuring large storage spaces, we tend to carry large number of tunes. It often makes us more bothering to look for tunes which we want to listen to. On the one hand, we usually listen to the tunes on the music players by manually selecting playlists or album names, rather than manually selecting each tune one-by-one. This paper presents GRAPE, a playlist visualization technique being used as user interfaces on the music players. GRAPE presents a set of tunes as a gradation image, by assigning colors to the tunes based on their musical features, and placing them onto a display space by applying Self Organizing Map (SOM). This paper describes the processing flow of GRAPE, and introduces user evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of GRAPE.