Music Tower Blocks: Multi-Faceted Exploration Interface for Web-Scale Music Access

Abstract

We present Music Tower Blocks, a novel browsing interface for interactive music visualization, capable of dealing with web-scale music collections nowadays offered by major music streaming services. Based on a clustering created from fused metadata and acoustic features, a block-based skyline landscape is constructed. It can be navigated by the user in several ways (zooming, panning, changing angle of slope). User-adjustable color coding is used for highlighting various facets, e.g., visualizing the distributions of genres and acoustic features. Furthermore, several search and filtering capabilities are provided (e.g., search for artists and tracks; filtering with respect to track popularity to focus on top hits or discovering unknown gems). In addition, Music Tower Blocks offers the user to connect to their personal music streaming profiles and highlight on the landscape their favorite or recently-listened-to music, to support exploring parts of the landscape near to (or far-away from) their own taste.