Dunya: a system for browsing audio music collections exploiting cultural context

Abstract

Music recommendation and discovery is an important MIR application with a strong impact in the music industry, but most music recommendation systems are still quite generic and without much musical knowledge. In this paper we present a web-based software application that lets users interact with an audio music collection through the use of musical concepts that are derived from a specific musical culture, in this case Carnatic music. The application includes a database containing information relevant to that music collection, such as audio recordings, editorial information, and metadata obtained from various sources. An analysis module extracts features from the audio recordings that are related to Carnatic music, which are then used to create musically meaningful relationships between all of the items in the database. The application displays the content of these items, allowing users to navigate through the collection by identifying and showing other information that is related to the currently viewed item, either by showing the relationships between them or by using culturally relevant similarity measures. The basic architecture and the design principles developed are reusable for other music collections with different characteristics.