On the following pages a system based on the Self-Organizing Map which automatically organizes a collection of music files according to their musical genre and sound characteristics can be found. Frequency spectra are used to extract feature vectors describing sound and melody characteristics. A two-stage clustering procedure first groups music segments according to their similarity, followed by a clustering of compositions according to the segment similarities. As a result, pieces of music with similar sound characteristics are found in neighboring regions of the resulting map, thus offering a very intuitive interface to unknown music collections.
To get an overview of the here presented procedure follow this link (slides available here) or download the information.
This work is presented within a master thesis. Download it from here or read it online (it is in german).
Two collection, a copyrighted and a free music collection were processed. Find a list of the processed music here (copyrighted, free) collection. The resulting SOMs for copyrighted and free musiccollection can be found here.
Informations about the programs an an How-To-SOMeJukeBox can be found here.