The CoMIRVA Toolkit for Visualizing Music-Related Data

We present CoMIRVA, which is an abbreviation for Collection of Music Information Retrieval and Visualization Applications. CoMIRVA is a Java framework and toolkit for information retrieval and visualization that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. At the moment, the main functionalities of the toolkit include music information retrieval, web retrieval, and visualization of the extracted information. In this paper, we focus on the visualization aspects of CoMIRVA. Since many of the information retrieval functions are intended to be applied to problems of the field of music information retrieval (MIR), we demonstrate the functions using data like similarity matrices of music artists gained by analyzing artist-related web pages. Currently, CoMIRVA supports the following visualization techniques: Self-Organizing Map grid, Smoothed Data Histogram, Circled Bars, Circled Fans, Continuous Similarity Ring, and Sunburst. We present the corresponding functions with a special focus on the Sunburst visualization of term occurrence matrices, which we have implemented lately. Since one key feature of CoMIRVA is its easy extensibility, we further elaborate on how we used it for creating a novel user interface to digital music repositories.