Whether plotting thoughts using mind mapping, or explaining election results using graphics - to deal with a variety of information individuals need visualization techniques in order to be able to find the right information more effectively.
Also in the digital music arena a real hype has surrounded visualizations recently. People's collections are becoming increasingly larger and online music services offer access to huge catalogues of up to 18 million songs. On top of this there is recommendation technology and new devices with touch screen technology, that raise our understanding of relationships to a new level. Scrolling in list views has become bog standard.
What follows, therefore, is a short but systematic presentation of the visualization possibilities for use in software music players. Visualization in general, refers to the representation of a music collection in a player and more specifically to the interactive variants as part of the graphical user interface.
In the context of listening to music the actual data used for visualizations plays a crucial role. In general, discographic data, the sound itself, the evaluation of listening habits and information about the cultural context are all available:
- The basis for finding your way around music collections is almost always using data about the music (e.g. Title, Album, Artist, Genre)
- Nowadays sound analysis can also be used for organizational purposes in music collections (e.g. Mood, Tempo, Instruments)
- Listening habits refers to the individual preferences and/or information about the musical tastes of lots of users (e.g. evaluation of their own listening history, LastFM and collaborative filtering)
- And cultural context can be mapped, for example, with historical, geographical and biographical data, as well as with social tags that users create themselves
Usually, a combination of very different information is used to facilitate listening to music and navigation through a collection (e.g, sound and information about the music).
A further question about music visualization concerns the level at which visualizations are found: should individual songs, albums, artists or genres be displayed and is it possible to jump between these levels (e.g. by zooming and level of detail)? It makes more and more sense for a music player and for individual music collections to be at track level within a display, in order to have control over the individual songs. Here, the context of listening to albums, playlists or songs by certain artists, must also be considered.
The possibilities are almost unlimited in terms of visualizations and actually computing them. Using the above named data interactive charts and maps of all kinds can be created. What also needs to be decided is whether the graphical summaries are dynamic (e.g. for changes within a collection) or whether certain elements (e.g. songs or artists) with a fixed position should be displayed in the visualization: in terms of navigation.
A standard is already emerging among individual music collections: visualizations go all the way back to song level, the songs are arranged on an interactive map (2D and 3D), and cover, colors, spacing between elements, as well as the size of graphic elements for displaying information are used. The results of the sound file analysis are combined with information about the music and listening habits. Finding your way around a music collection today is therefore navigating using the music itself.
It looks as though this is one of the many responses to the current technological developments and ways of dealing with digital music - where the journey on the music map is headed still remains to be seen.
mufin vision
With mufin's own technology for automated music analysis, we have also focused on the visualization of music. The first commercial product to provide the technology to create visualizations of digital music collections was released worldwide in 2007, it was music player software for PC, MAGIX MP3 Maker 14. You can currently test out the visualization technology mufin vision in the mufin player for PC or Android for free. In June 2011 the new version of the Android app will appear.
Sources:
[1] http://labs.vis4.net/parteispenden/
[2] http://www.musicthinktank.com/mtt-open/face-the-interface.html
[3] http://www.repeatingbeats.com/resources/Slloyd_MSc_External.pdf
[4] http://ismir2007.ismir.net/proceedings/ISMIR2007_p173_lamere.pdf
[5] http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/documents/Anita_FINAL_THESIS.pdf
[6] http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
[7] http://visualizingmusic.com/
[8] http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5853
[9] http://www.formater.de/
[10] http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf
[11] http://itunes.apple.com/app/discovr/id412768094?mt=8
