ThumbnailDJ: Visual Thumbnails of Music Content

Musical perception is non-visual and people cannot describe what a song sounds like without listening to it. To facilitate music browsing and searching, we explore the automatic generation of visual thumbnails for music. Targeting an expert user groups, DJs, we developed a concept named ThumbnailDJ: Based on a metaphor of music notation, a visual thumbnail can be automatically generated for an audio file, including information of tempo, volume, genre, aggressiveness and bass. We discussed ThumbnailDJ and other 3 selected concepts with DJs, and our concept was preferred most. Based on the results of this interview, we refined ThumbnailDJ and conducted an evaluation with DJs. The results confirmed that ThumbnailDJ can facilitate expert users browsing and searching within their music collection.