GeoMuzik: A Geographic Interface for Large Music Collections

This report presents the master thesis proposal for a development of an interface for visualization of large music collections. By proposing a new paradigm for navigation and visualization of these collections, we intend to enhance user experience and music discovery. This is achieved by generating a geographic interface to display the music collection contents as if they were spread out in a globe or map. Music collection information is retreived from widely known web services such as Wikipedia and Last.FM. Content is displayed according to number of plays and genre. Tags retrieved from Last.FM were used to identify dierent genres for each artist. Music discovery is encouraged by a playlist implementation. Users trace a route in the world map, and through triangulation techniques, GeoMuzik samples the route and retrieves artists and songs that are close to the pathway defined. In order to evaluate the results a survey was applied to a certain number of subjects and its results are presented as part of this piece of work. Conclusions and future work present the impacts obtained from the use of the interface and the possible extensions that would improve this new approach.