Musescape: an Interactive Content-aware Music Browser

Advances in hardware performance, network bandwidth and audio compression have made possible the creation of large personal digital music collections. Although, there is a significant body of work in image and video browsing, there has been little work that directly addresses the problem of audio and especially music browsing. In this paper, Musescape, a prototype music browsing system is described and evaluated. The main characteristics of the system are automatic configuration based on Computer Audition techniques and the use of continuous audio-music feedback while browsing and interacting with the system. The described ideas and techniques take advantage of the unique characteristics of music signals. A pilot user study was conducted to explore and evaluate the proposed user interface. The results indicate that the use of automatically extracted tempo information reduces browsing time and that continuous interactive audio feedback is appropriate for this particular domain.