Assistive music browsing using self-organizing maps

Abstract

Music listening is an important activity for many people. Advances in technology have made possible the creation of music collections with thousands of songs in portable music players. Navigating these large music collections is challenging especially for users with vision and/or motion disabilities. In this paper we describe our current efforts to build effective music browsing interfaces for people with disabilities. The foundation of our approach is the automatic extraction of features for describing musical content and the use of selforganizing maps to create two-dimensional representations of music collections. The ultimate goal is effective browsing without using any meta-data. We also describe different control interfaces to the system: a regular desktop application, an iPhone implementation, an eye tracker, and a smart room interface based on Wii-mote tracking.