Songexplorer: A tabletop application for exploring large collections of songs

Abstract

This paper presents SongExplorer, a system for the exploration of large music collections on tabletop interfaces. SongExplorer addresses the problem of finding new interesting songs on large music databases, from an interaction design perspective. Using high level descriptors of musical songs, SongExplorer creates a coherent 2D map based on similarity, in which neighboring songs tend to be more similar. All songs are represented as throbbing circles that highlight their more relevant high-level properties, and the resulting music map is browseable and zoomable by the users who can use their fingers as well as specially designed tangible pucks, for helping them to find interesting music, independently of their previous knowledge of the collection. SongExplorer also offers basic player capabilities, allowing the users to organize the songs they have just discovered into playlists which can be manipulated as well as played and displayed. In this paper, the system hardware, software and interaction design are explained, and the usability tests carried are presented. Finally, conclusions and future work are discussed. © 2009 International Society for Music Information Retrieval.