URL:

files/proceedings/2010/56.pdf

Abstract:

Sometimes users of a music retrieval system are not able to explicitly state what they are looking for. They rather want to browse a collection in order to get an overview and to discover interesting content. A common approach for browsing a collection relies on a similarity-preserving projection of objects (tracks, albums or artists) onto the (typically two-dimensional) display space. Inevitably, this implicates the use of dimension reduction techniques that cannot always preserve neighborhood and thus introduce distortions of the similarity space. This paper describes on- going work on MusicGalaxy – an interactive user-interface based on an adaptive non-linear multi-focus zoom lens that alleviates the impact of projection distortions. Further- more, the interface allows manipulation of the neighbor- hoods as well as the projection by weighting different fa- cets of music similarity. This way the visualization can be adapted to the user’s way of exploring the collection. Apart from the current interface prototype, findings from early evaluations are presented.