SXSW Spotlight on Tools: Music Discovery through Data Visualization

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On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an inspiring solo SXSW presentation given by Paul Lamere, Director of Developer Platform at The Echo Nest on the problems with music discovery and how visualizations can help. Sure, we all know how cool data visualizations are, but I for one wasn’t aware of the interactive music data visualization available that will help you discover not only new music – but your own personal music collection (minus MTV’s fabulous Music Meter – that we did the PR launch for).

According to Paul, without these tools, we find ourselves listening to the same music over and over. I hear that – I’ve played the same playlist at my dinner parties for the last two years! And, apparently I’m not the only forgetting what’s in my collection. Echo Nest did a study that found out of 5,000 listeners averaging 3,500 songs in each respective music collections, 65 percent of music in collections had not been listened to.

Here’s a recap of my favorite interactive visualizations presented by Lamere for music discovery:

• NepTune: Creates a virtual landscape which allows users to navigate their music collections.
• Mr. Emo “Music Retrieval in the Emotional Plane:” This interface lets you explore music based on mood.
• The Music Box, created by Anita Lillie, Music Box is a tool for exploring your own personal music collection.
• Hitlantis: A fully zoomable visual map UI for discovering music, being released this week for iPad.

Interesting side note: Music visualizations made their big screen debut in 2004’s School of Rock, when Jack Black playing the role of Dewey Finn, used a visualization to teach his students the history of rock music.

Paul graciously has posted the slides from his presentation on his personal blog, Music Machinery: http://musicmachinery.com/. For more buzz on the panel, check out #musicviz and Hugh Garry who Storify’d the session and incorporated a tweet from yours truly. (FYI, Storify is a platform that allows you to take people’s posts on social media and turn them into “compelling” stories.)