SongExplorer: browse song galaxies
Friday, June 26, 2009 at 21:27
admin in Music, interfaces, software

My own humble digital music collection contains roughly 15,000 songs at the moment. The larger it gets the harder it is to browse through, and if I don't remember the name of an artist or song, I tend to forget I even own the music. Browsing trough my own music collection can be quite surprising. But I don't like using the old iTunes interface. Could it be a bit more intuitive?

Carles F. Julià explores this area with his research project SongExplorer: a tabletop system for exploring musical collections. It presents the user with a 'galaxy of songs'. By touching the table in an iPhone-like manner you can browse through the collection, create and manipulate play lists, and discover relationships between songs.

I'm very interested in new ways of organizing information. I think there still is a lot to be improved in this area, even in the organization of regular files on your computer. I tried tagging my files for some time, but still didn't find a satisfying workflow. I definitely think throwing everything in one big 'box' and using some search functionality and meta-data to find things is the way to go.

Article originally appeared on Sound Art, Sound Installations, Sonic Inspiration (http://www.everydaylistening.com/).
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