Music Circles: An interactive data visualization tool that helps users discover new music

Today, users can listen to music and discover new artists, songs or albums on a variety of music streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and more. Many developers have been trying to create tools that could improve these services, such as music recommendation systems that suggest new songs or playlists to users based on their preferences and on music they listened to in the past. Researchers at Seoul National University recently created an interactive data visualization tool that could enhance both existing and emerging music streaming services. This tool, called Music Circles, can represent songs as unique vectors and then calculate similarities between different vectors to group similar songs into clusters. "As music lovers with different tastes, we came together for a project that would find novel ways of visually representing and grouping abstract music data," Seokgi Kim, Jihye Park, Kihong Seong, Namwoo Cho, Junho Min and Hwajung Hong, the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore via email.