Album sequencing is a critical part of the album production process. Recently, a data-driven approach was proposed that sequences general collections of independent media by extracting the narrative essence of the items in the collections. While this approach implies an album sequencing technique, it is not widely accessible to a less technical audience, requiring advanced knowledge of machine learning techniques to use. To address this, we introduce a new user-friendly web-based tool that allows a less technical audience to upload music tracks, execute this technique in one click, and subsequently presents the result in a clean visualization to the user. To both increase the number of templates available to the user and address shortcomings of previous work, we also introduce a new direct transformer-based album sequencing method. We find that our more direct method outperforms a random baseline but does not reach the same performance as the narrative essence approach. Both methods are included in our web-based user interface, and this -- alongside a full copy of our implementation -- is publicly available at https://github.com/dylanashley/automatic-album-sequencing

The act of telling stories is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. This work introduces the concept of narrative information, which we define to be the overlap in information space between a story and the items that compose the story. Using contrastive learning methods, we show how modern artificial neural networks can be leveraged to distill stories and extract a representation of the narrative information. We then demonstrate how evolutionary algorithms can leverage this to extract a set of narrative templates and how these templates -- in tandem with a novel curve-fitting algorithm we introduce -- can reorder music albums to automatically induce stories in them. In the process of doing so, we give strong statistical evidence that these narrative information templates are present in existing albums. While we experiment only with music albums here, the premises of our work extend to any form of (largely) independent media.