Beatles Explorer (2008)

Challenge

Different users with a different musical background may have different ideas about what makes two music tracks sound similar. Hence, a similarity-based structuring of a music collection should reflect personal views.

Solution

Learn a personalized distance measure from the way a user interacts with the collection.

Core Technologies

  • hexagonal Growing Self-Organizing Map (GSOM) for structuring the collection into groups of similar tracks
  • user feedback by assigning tracks to different groups (drag & drop)
  • automatic adaptation of the track distance measure based on the new group assignment through quadratic programming
  • implementation: Java using the processing.org framework for visualization