Search is not Discovery
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Paul Lamere over at Music Machinery has a great write-up about Google’s new music search feature. To give you a sense of where he stands, he ends the post with a memorable mantra: “Search is not discovery”.
Search is great if I know that I’m looking specifically for Pearl Jam’s live cover of “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay“. Search becomes less useful if I’m sick of listening to Pearl Jam and want something new — something not Pearl Jam specifically, but something similar…you know, something that I’ll like.
This is where music discovery comes in. Companies like the Echo Nest are trying to make it possible to one day type “find music that I will like” into that ubiquitous search box and get back something meaningful.
On that subject, I’ve been experimenting with a feature for the next version of Music Explorer FX which will lend itself to music discovery “in the large”.
Currently MEFX allows you to explore the artist similarity space very linearly. Generally, once you’ve selected an artist you can go forward, or back, but you can’t easily branch off and return later, or see comparisons between more than a few artists at once.
But what if you could browse a much larger segment of the similarity space, and see connections between 100 artists, instead of just two? What if you could “plot a course” between Pearl Jam and Otis Redding, viewing all the artists along the way?
Below is a concept screen shot (written in JavaFX) illustrating this idea. I hope you like abstract dots!
More details to follow…
Tags: JavaFX, musicexplorerfx, Visualization
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