KNOWeSCAPE: Analyzing the dynamics of information and knowledge landscapes

A late post about an amazing event. As pointed out in their website, there is no scape from the expansion of information! Yes, we need strategies for structuring, visualizing and locating what you need.

I have been getting more and more interested on the role of music visualization. There has been a large amount of research within the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field intended to extract meaningful descriptions from music in audio format, to compute similarity between music pieces and to classify them according to semantic concepts such as mood, style or preference. However, less effort has been devoted to investigate which are the best strategies to present, in a visual way, this information to users with different profiles (e.g. expert musicians and people with no theoretical musical knowledge) and in different contexts (e.g. music listening or education). The main challenges are to provide intuitive visualizations of large music collections, to present information related to different temporal scales  (from real-time to global descriptors), and to combine descriptions related to different musical facets such as score, rhythm, tonality or instrumentation.

I had the chance to be invited as a speaker to a workshop on knowledge order an science. In this talk I presented some of our approaches to music visualization in terms of tonality, dynamics, tempo, structure, mood and music preference. I also discussed how these approaches are being considered in the PHENICX project to enrich live music concert performances in classical music. I also wanted to discuss about the need of multi-scale, personalized and adaptive representations of music collections.

It was a great event, and you can find on the web the abstracts of the different presentations and the slides. There is also here a summary of the workshop. It was an enriching multi-disciplinary experience, I was happy to see more women than is usually in tech events and now I have the chance to be part of this COST action and great community. Let me illustrate that with a figure from Agustin Martorell’s thesis.