Automatic Album Sequencing

TL;DR

This paper presents a user-friendly web tool for album sequencing that incorporates a novel transformer-based method, making advanced sequencing techniques accessible to non-experts while comparing its performance to existing approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a new accessible web interface and a transformer-based album sequencing method, expanding usability and addressing limitations of previous narrative essence techniques.

Findings

Transformer-based method outperforms random baseline.

The new method does not match the performance of the narrative essence approach.

The web tool makes advanced album sequencing accessible to non-technical users.

Abstract

Album sequencing is a critical part of the album production process. Recently, a data-driven approach was proposed that sequences general collections of independent media by extracting the narrative essence of the items in the collections. While this approach implies an album sequencing technique, it is not widely accessible to a less technical audience, requiring advanced knowledge of machine learning techniques to use. To address this, we introduce a new user-friendly web-based tool that allows a less technical audience to upload music tracks, execute this technique in one click, and subsequently presents the result in a clean visualization to the user. To both increase the number of templates available to the user and address shortcomings of previous work, we also introduce a new direct transformer-based album sequencing method. We find that our more direct method outperforms a random baseline but does not reach the same performance as the narrative essence approach. Both methods are included in our web-based user interface, and this -- alongside a full copy of our implementation -- is publicly available at https://github.com/dylanashley/automatic-album-sequencing