Exploring Music Collections on Mobile Devices

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Exploring Music Collections on Mobile Devices

• Michael Kuhn
• Olga Goussevskaia
• Roger Wattenhofer
• MobileHCI 2008
• Amsterdam, NL

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History

• Storage media
• Vinyl records
• Compact cassetts
• Compact discs
• An Album is stored on a single physical storage
  medium
• Sequence of songs given by album
• Album is typically listened to as a whole

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Music today

• Huge offer, easily available
• filesharing, iTunes, amazon, etc.
• Large collections
• The entire collection is stored on a single
  electronic storage medium
• Organization by albums (and other lists) is no
  longer appropriate

organize by similarity
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Contributions

• Vision
• Plays songs the user likes
• Overview of a collection
• Directly on mp3-player (or phone)
• Problems on mobile devices
• Limited input
• Limited output
• Limited processing power
• Limited memory
• Contribution
• Use song coordinates that reflect similarity
• Proof-of-concept implementation on Android

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Music Explorer

• www.musicexplorer.org
• Webservice that provides 10D coordinates for
  songs
• Similar songs are close to each other in
  Euclidean space
• Similarity information based on co-occurrence
  data
• Currently about 400K songs available
• Similarity derived by means ofco-occurrence
  analysis

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Music in Euclidean Space

• Performance
• Similarity computation comes almost for free
  O(1) time
• Memory footprint is extremly low O(1) per song
• All information can be saved in the file, no
  server connection required.
• Applications
• Trajectories (playlists, ...)
• Volumes (region of interest, ...)
• etc.

coordinates are well suited for mobile
applications
coordinates are well suited for similarity based
organization
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Playlist generation

• Interpolation between start and end-point
• Smooth transition from one style to the other
• In reality 10 dimensions

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Similarity-based Navigation

• Basic idea Browse through neighborhood lists
• Challenges
• Reachability Entire collection should be
  reachable from any given starting point
• Searchability It should be possible to reach
  new regions within few steps

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Similarity-based Navigation (Small-World)

• J. Kleinberg The Small-World Phenomenon An
  Algorithmic Perspective, STOC00
• Augmenting a (hyper-)grid with edges following a
  particular length distribution (d-r, r dim)
  leads to polylog diameter (gtreachability)
• Short paths do not only exist, but can be found
  using local knowledge only (gtsearchability)

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Similarity-based Navigation (Clustering)

• Idea Cluster similar songs and list clusters
  instead of single songs
• Cover entire collection (gtreachability)
• Small clusters for close-by songs
• Large clusters for distant regions
  (gtsearchability)

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Conclusions and Future Work

• Embedding songs into Euclidean space opens many
  possibilities for mobile applications
• We have presented a proof-of-concept Android
  application that
• can create smooth playlists
• allows to browse collections based on smilarity
• does not require (expensive) connection to a
  server or DB
• Future directions
• Visually browsing collections (problem 10D gt
  2D)
• Playlist generation on the fly
• Collaborative features
• ...

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Thanks for your Attention

• Questions?