Music Genre Bars

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization method using horizontally stacked bar charts to represent multi-genre annotations in music datasets, demonstrated through a streaming app prototype to aid playlist selection.

Contribution

It proposes a novel visualization technique for soft music genre annotations and demonstrates its application in an interactive music streaming interface.

Findings

Stacked bar charts effectively visualize multi-genre data.

The genre bars can serve as interactive sliders for user input.

Prototype shows potential for improved playlist curation.

Abstract

Music Genres, as a popular meta-data of music, are very useful to organize, explore or search music datasets. Soft music genres are weighted multiple-genre annotations to songs. In this initial work, we propose horizontally stacked bar charts to represent a music dataset annotated by these soft music genres. For this purpose, we take an example of a toy dataset consisting of songs labelled with help of three music genres; Blues, Jazz and Country. We demonstrate how such a stacked bar chart can be used as a slider for user-input in an interface. We implement this by embedding this genre bar in a streaming application prototype and show its utility in choosing playlists. We finally conclude by proposing further work and future explorations on our proposed preliminary research.