Music Rainbow is a simple user interface to discover artists. The user controls the interface with a knob which can be turned (to select an artist) and pushed (to listen to music from the selected artist).
The demonstration is based on a collection containing 558 artists. The artists are projected onto a circle. Artists whose music is similar are placed close to each other. The similarity is computed by analyzing the audio contents of their songs. A "traveling salesman" algorithm is used to map the artists on the circle.
Colors encode different styles of music. Words describe different regions of the rainbow. These words are automatically extracted from web pages mentioning the artists.
The right side shows a magnification. The selected artist is highlighted in white. The box in the lower right summarizes the selected artist with words and colors.
MusicRainbow was developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) as part of the CrestMuse project. The user interface was built with processing by Elias Pampalk. The knob used in the demonstration is a Griffin PowerMate.
Resources: