Intelligent User Interfaces for Social Music Discovery and Exploration of Large-scale Music Repositories

In this position paper, we address the question of how to make music search and discovery more appealing, more exciting, and more joyful. In particular, we argue to research methods that foster serendipitous encounters with music items and to integrate ways for social interaction while exploring music collections and discovering the gems in today's huge catalogs available through online streaming platforms. We identify two major challenges here: the need for (i) highly efficient clustering and information visualization techniques that scale to these music catalogs and (ii) novel user interfaces that explain the clustering of music items and provide means to make the exploration of music a social event.