Usability evaluation of visualization interfaces for content-based music retrieval systems

This research presents a formal user evaluation of a typical visualization method for content-based music information retrieval (MIR) systems, and also proposes a novel interface to improve MIR usability. Numerous interfaces to visualize content-based MIR systems have been proposed, but reports on user evaluations of such proposed GUIs are scarce. This research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a typical 2-D visualization method for content-based MIR systems, by conducting comparative user evaluations against the traditional list-based format to present MIR results to the user. Based on the observations of the experimental results, we next propose a 3-D visualization system, which features a function to specify sub-regions of the feature space based on genre classification results, and a function which allows users to select features that are assigned to the axes of the 3-D space. Evaluation of this GUI conclude that the functions of the 3-D system can significantly improve both the efficiency and usability of MIR systems.