Shades of Music: Letting Users Discover Sub-Song Similarities

Many interesting pieces of music violate established structures or rules of their genre on purpose. These songs can be very atypical in their interior structure and their different parts might actually allude to entirely different other songs or genres. We present a query-by-example-based user interface that shows songs related to the one currently playing. This relation is not based on overall similarity, but on the similarity between the part currently playing and parts of other songs in the collection along different dimensions (pitch, timbre, bars, beats, loudness). The similarity is initially computed automatically, but can be corrected by the user. Once a sufficient number of corrections has been made, we expect the similarity measure to reach an even higher precision. Our system thereby allows users to discover hidden similarities on the level of song sections instead of whole songs.