Content-based Organization of Digital Audio Collections

With increasing amounts of audio being stored and distributed electronically, intuitive and efficient access to large music collections is becoming crucial. To this end we are developing algorithms for audio feature extraction, allowing to compute acoustic similarity between pieces of music, as well as tools utilizing this information to support retrieval of as well as navigation in music repositories. This paper provides an overview of the Rhythm Patterns feature set and demonstrates its suitability for music genre recognition. Furthermore, it outlines the principles of organizing digital music repositories using Self-Organizing Maps and presents the novel PlaySOM interface and the PocketSOMPlayer for mobile devices, both providing intuitively explorable music information spaces.