An approach is presented to automatically build a search engine for large-scale music collections that can be queried through natural language. While existing approaches depend on explicit manual annotations and meta-data assigned to the individual audio pieces, we automatically derive descriptions by making use of methods from Web Retrieval and Music Information Retrieval. Based on the ID3 tags of a collection of mp3 files, we retrieve relevant Web pages via Google queries and use the contents of these pages to characterize the music pieces and represent them by term vectors. By incorporating complementary information about acoustic similarity we are able to both reduce the dimensionality of the vector space and improve the performance of retrieval, i.e. the quality of the results. Furthermore, the usage of audio similarity allows us to also characterize audio pieces when there is no associated information found on the Web.

We present a novel, innovative user interface to music repositories. Given an arbitrary collection of digital music files, our system creates a virtual landscape which allows the user to freely navigate in this collection. This is accomplished by automatically extracting features from the audio signal and training a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) on them to form clusters of similar sounding pieces of music. Subsequently, a Smoothed Data Histogram (SDH) is calculated on the SOM and interpreted as a three-dimensional height profile. This height profile is visualized as a three-dimensional island landscape containing the pieces of music. While moving through the terrain, the closest sounds with respect to the listener's current position can be heard. This is realized by anisotropic auralization using a 5.1 surround sound model. Additionally, we incorporate knowledge extracted automatically from the web to enrich the landscape with semantic information. More precisely, we display words and related images that describe the heard music on the landscape to support the exploration.

This article comprehensively addresses the problem of similarity measurement between music artists via text-based features extracted from Web pages. To this end, we present a thorough evaluation of different term-weighting strategies, normalization methods, aggregation functions, and similarity measurement techniques. In large-scale genre classification experiments carried out on real-world artist collections, we analyze several thousand combinations of settings/parameters that influence the similarity calculation process, and investigate in which way they impact the quality of the similarity estimates. Accurate similarity measures for music are vital for many applications, such as automated playlist generation, music recommender systems, music information systems, or intelligent user interfaces to access music collections by means beyond text-based browsing. Therefore, by exhaustively analyzing the potential of text-based features derived from artist-related Web pages, this article constitutes an important contribution to context-based music information research.

We present a technique for combining audio signal-based music similarity with web-based musical artist similarity to accelerate the task of automatic playlist generation. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed method by extending a recently published interface for music players that benefits from intelligent structuring of audio collections. While the original approach involves the calculation of similarities between every pair of songs in a collection, we incorporate web-based data to reduce the number of necessary similarity calculations. More precisely, we exploit artist similarity determined automatically by means of web retrieval to avoid similarity calculation between tracks of dissimilar and/or unrelated artists. We evaluate our acceleration technique on two audio collections with different characteristics. It turns out that the proposed combination of audio-and text-based similarity not only reduces the number of necessary calculations considerably but also yields better results, in terms of musical quality, than the initial approach based on audio data only. Additionally, we conducted a small user study that further confirms the quality of the resulting playlists.

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We present a novel interface to (portable) music players that benefits from intelligently structured collections of audio files. For structuring, we calculate similarities between every pair of songs and model a travelling salesman problem (TSP) that is solved to obtain a playlist (i.e., the track ordering during playback) where the average distance between consecutive pieces of music is minimal according to the similarity measure. The similarities are determined using both audio signal analysis of the music tracks and web-based artist profile comparison. Indeed, we will show how to enhance the quality of the well-established methods based on audio signal processing with features derived from web pages of music artists. Using a TSP allows for creating circular playlists that can be easily browsed with a wheel as input device. We investigate the usefulness of four different TSP algorithms for this purpose. For evaluating the quality of the generated playlists, we apply a number of quality measures to two real-world music collections. It turns out that the proposed combination of audio and text-based similarity yields better results than the initial approach based on audio data only. We implemented an audio player as Java applet to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Furthermore, we present the results of a small user study conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated playlists.

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We present an approach that offers the user a convenient and meaningful way to access her music on a mobile device. By exploiting information on acoustic similarity and community-based music labels, a music collection is automatically structured and described to allow for easy orientation and navigation within the collection. To this end, the complete collection is arranged along a circular playlist path such that similar sounding pieces are grouped together. As a consequence, regions of musical styles emerge. Furthermore, we propose two approaches to derive informative descriptors that are displayed on the different regions, allowing an overview of the whole collection at a glance. For demonstration, we implemented our prototype interface on an Apple iPod.