An abstract representation of pieces of digital music. Audio features are computed from the raw audio signal. Simple features are the number of zero crossings of the audio signal or its centroid (as, for example, defined in the MPEG7 standard). More sophisticated approaches, such as MP3-based features, rhythm Patterns, Rhythm Histograms, or statistical Spectrum Descriptors take into account, for instance, findings from psycho-acoustics.
Published in Chapter:
Map-Based User Interfaces for Music Information Retrieval
Robert Neumayer (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) and Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-879-6.ch032
Abstract
In this chapter, we introduce alternative ways to access digital audio collections. We give an overview of existing applications based on tow-dimensional, map-like representations of music collections. Further, we explain two applications for accessing audio files that are based on the Self-Organising Map, an unsupervised neural network model. These two applications—PlaySOM and PocketSOM—will be explained in greater detail, paying special attention to their unique properties and implementations for several mobile devices. These examples are supposed to gain the readers’ interest for alternative interfaces to large audio collections. Besides, we hope to show that alternative interfaces are feasible for both desktop computers and mobile devices and offer a practical approach to pressing issues in accessing digital collections.