MusicRainbow: Demonstration Video

Music Rainbow is a simple user interface to discover artists. The user controls the interface with a knob which can be turned (to select an artist) and pushed (to listen to music from the selected artist).



Video

The original songs were replaced with songs randomly selected from the RWC Music Database (RWC-MDB-P-2001) due to copyright restrictions. All versions have no sound in the first half of the video. The video is available in the following formats.

FormatQualitySizeAudioVideo
Macromedia Flashgood9 MBRWCWebpage
QuickTime Moviebest25 MBRWCDownload (MOV)
Windows Media Videook18 MBRWCDownload (WMV)
Windows Media Videook6 MBNoneDownload (WMV)


Captions in the Video

This demonstration is based on a collection containing 558 artists. The artists are projected onto a circle. Artists whose music is similar are placed close to each other. The similarity is computed by analyzing the audio contents of their songs. A "travelling salesman" algorithm is used to map the artists on the circle.

Colors encode different styles of music. Words describe different regions of the rainbow. These words are automatically extracted from web pages mentioning the artists.

The right side shows a magnification. The selected artist is highlighted in white. The box in the lower right summarizes the selected artist with words and colors.

User Input:
Turn the knob to select an artist. Push the knob to listen to the selected artist.

About

For details see:
Elias Pampalk & Masataka Goto, "MusicRainbow: A New User Interface to Discover Artists Using Audio-based Similarity and Web-based Labeling", in the Proceedings of the ISMIR International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, 2006.
>> PDF, Poster.

MusicRainbow was developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) as part of the CrestMuse project. The user interface was built with processing by Elias Pampalk. The knob used in the demonstration is a Griffin PowerMate.

Last Update: 20 Apr 2007