Automatically Describing Music on a Map.

In this paper, we present a technique to automatically create music maps labeled with semantic descriptors, the so called Music Description Maps (MDM). Based on a Self-organizing Map (SOM) trained on audio features, we create term profiles that characterize the type of music on the clusters. To this end, we efficiently retrieve music-related term descriptors for the contained artists from the Web. These descriptors are used in conjuction with a SOM-labeling strategy to identify words and phrases commonly used in the context of the associated music. Additionally, regions of similar clusters are uncovered. Music maps labeled in such are manner can aid the user in retrieving desired music from a very large repository, either by providing landmarks on the map or by allowing the formulation of queries consisting of terms describing the musical content.