Interactive Visualization for Music Rediscovery and Serendipity

Although personal tastes may change over time, overall people still enjoy music they have not listen to for some time or not very often. However, most solution for browsing music collections do not focus on showing or suggesting these songs to create serendipitous rediscoveries. Instead they promote most recently played songs as an entry point for browsing and playing music. This way, users are constantly listening to the same music, causing the least heard to become forgotten. In this paper, we present BACH, an interactive visualization and exploration tool for personal music collections that uses the listening history of the user to influence the songs suggested and the way they are presented to him/her. Our goal is to help users rediscover their music collection for different periods of the day through the perspective of their listening history. Experimental results revealed that users understood and enjoyed our solution and that they were able to rediscovertheir collections by listening to songs heard some time ago.