Exploring Music Collections: An Interactive, Dimensionality Reduction Approach to Visualizing Songbanks

Abstract

This is an overview paper on an interactive music exploration interface for music collections. This interface is meant to help explore the cross-cultural similarities, interactions, and patterns of music excerpts from different regions and understand the similarities by employing computational audio analysis, machine learning, and visualization techniques. In our computational analysis, we used standard audio features that capture timbre information and projected them onto a lower-dimensional space for visualizing the (dis)similarity. There are two collections of non-Eurogenetic music under study. The 2-D and 3-D mappings are visualized through a dashboard application and also rendered in Virtual Reality space where users can interact and explore to get meaningful insights about the structural (dis)similarities of the music collections.