SongExplorer: Exploring Large Musical Databases Using a Tabletop Interface

With the democratization of the access to the Internet, in the last years, the amount of different music we are exposed to has grow exponentially. In a few years we have moved from having a CD collection of our favorite artist to having every album of every song we have heard more than once. Personal music players have a capacity of 40.000+ songs and it keeps growing. In a world where we have virtually every song recorded in history, how can we find something interesting to us?

SongExplorer is a tabletop application which wants to solve this problem: using high level descriptors of musical songs it creates a coherent 2D map where the songs are represented as oscillating circles. This map is browseable and zoomable by the user who can use her fingers and tangible objects over the table, helping her to find interesting music regadless he knows the songs or not.

SongExplorer also offers basic player capabilities , allowing the users to organize the songs they have just discovered into playlists which can be manipulated as well as played and displayed.