SoundAnchoring: Content-based Exploration of Music Collections with Anchored Self-Organized Maps

We present a content-based music collection exploration tool based on a variation of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm. The tool, named SoundAnchoring, displays the music collection on a 2D frame and allows users to ex-plicitly choose the locations of some data points known as anchors. By establishing the anchors ’ locations, users determine where clusters containing perceptually similar pieces of music will be placed on the 2D frame. User eval-uation showed that the cluster location control provided by the anchoring process improved the experience of building playlists and exploring the musical collection. 1