Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualisation for Discovery

With so much music available, finding new music that you like can be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate the wheat from the chaff. In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive, immersive 3D environments. We'll explore a number of different visualization techniques including graphs, trees, maps, timelines and flow diagrams and we'll examine different types of music data that can contribute to a visualization. Using numerous examples drawn from commercial and research systems we'll show how visualizations are being used now to enhance music discovery and we'll demonstrate some new visualization techniques coming out of the labs that we'll find in tomorrow's music discovery applications.

  1. Another brilliant session hosted by Paul Lamere, the man behind  http://musicmachinery.com, a site you get lost in for hours and hours.
  2. Paul kicked off with some amazing stats that explain why visualising music for discovery is so importance. The tools for creating music have increased as the barriers for publishing have been removed which means there is an abundance of music. In a study of study of 5000 listeners he discovered they had 35,000 tracks of which 65% of them had not been listened to once. People don’t know how to find their way through the collections..
  3. Music discovery challenges. Never been easier to publish music, the haystack is getting bigger #musicviz
  4. The average listener hasn't listened to 65% of their music collection. #musicviz @echonest #sxsw
  5. "For people who don't have friends, there are music recommendations" #musicviz
  6. Paul talked about the different kinds of visualisations, such as hand created, computer generated, interactive etc. You can see some of the sites he demoed below and get more more from the deck of slides he used in his presentation at the bottom of the page.
  7. Love that @plamere started his #musicviz talk with the Broad St Pump cholera map. Now enjoying the grand tour of music maps.
  8. Break up songs visualised on key axes (sad-angry and my fault-your fault). Awesome. #musicviz yfrog.com/hsjzsmdj
  9. People who listen to Indie bands are smarter than those that listen to country? Booya. #musicviz #sxtxstate #sxsw

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hugh garry

Creative Strategist at http://storythings.com - we help people tell stories and we make things. Freelance Digital media consultant. Former BBC digital bloke.

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