Musicream: Integrated music-listening interface for active, flexible, and unexpected encounters with musical pieces

Abstract

This paper describes Musicream, a novel music-listening interface that lets a user unexpectedly come across various musical pieces similar to those liked by the user. Most existing “query-by-example” interfaces are based on similaritybased searching, so they return the same results for the same query, meaning that a user of those systems always receives the same list of musical pieces sorted by similarity. Therefore, most existing systems do not provide a user an opportunity to encounter various unfamiliar musical pieces by chance. Musicream facilitates active, flexible, and unexpected encounters with musical pieces by providing four functions: the music-disc streaming function which creates a flow of many musical-piece entities (discs) from a large music collection, the similarity-based sticking function which allows a user to easily pick out and listen to similar pieces from the flow, the meta-playlist function which can generate a playlist of playlists (ordered lists of pieces), and the time-machine function which automatically records all Musicream activities and allows a user to visit and retrieve a past state as if using a time machine. In our experiments, these functions were used seamlessly to achieve active and creative querying and browsing of music collections, confirming the effectiveness of Musicream.