Spatial Organisation of Music

Kristoffer Jensen and Kirstin Lyon

Interviews with professionals and music lovers indicate that manual

organisation is the only option if they need to re-find a piece of

music efficiently. This is possible in the optics (? maybe a

different word? ) of a slow increase of the music collection, by

buying records one at a time. The modern p2p sharing permits a much

faster increase of the music collection. In addition, a shift from

property payment to playback payment is easy to envisage in the

future. This would allow anybody to have access to the total music

production made to date, and only pay if a song is downloaded. A very

large music database certainly demands help in organisation, browsing

and retrieval if all music should be the potential next piece to

listen to.

A simple organisation scheme is a two-dimensional spatial

organisation where each new song can be placed in an arbitrary

position on the workspace. The organisation of music will help in

reducing the time and effort spent in re-finding individual music, as

well as improving the familiarty of the database. This individual

space organisation will be enhanced in the following ways; 1)

clusters of organisations are identified with an automatic clustering

algorithm, and landmarks are positioned in the centre of each

cluster. An option to provide a verbal attribute to each cluster is

given. 2) In order to facilitate collaborative sharing and

discussions of the music collections, each individual spatial

organisation is scaled and rotated to minimise the distance to

another organisation. This enabled the constructuion of one reference

organisation, that has the minimal distance to all individual

organisations. 3) includions of new music by inserting at the minimal

distance to similar music. This is propsed by calculating the

relationship of the spatial organisation ot meta-data and acoustic

features, that would allow the simple insertion at the minimum

distance to the features, mapped to the individual organisation.

At the moment, some experiments have completed to show the validity

of spatial organisation. More work remains before steps 1) to 3) can

be evaluated formally.