Groove Explorer: An Intelligent Visual Interface for Drum Loop Library Navigation Fred Bruford Mathieu Barthet Centre for Digital Music, Centre for Digital Music Queen Mary University of London Queen Mary University of London London, UK London, UK
[email protected] [email protected] SKoT McDonald Mark Sandler ROLI Ltd. Centre for Digital Music London, UK Queen Mary University of London
[email protected] London, UK
[email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Music producers nowadays rely on increasingly large libraries of Since the early days of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) as a loops, samples and virtual instrument sounds as part of the compo- research field, one significant topic of research has been inthein- sition process. Intelligent interfaces are therefore useful in enabling telligent visual organization of music data as a means of managing navigation of these databases in a way that supports the production and understanding the increasingly large quantities of data arising workflow. Within virtual drumming software, producers typically from advances in music content digitization [1]. Within digital au- rely on large libraries of symbolic drum loops. Due to their large dio workstation (DAW)-based music production environments, the size, navigating and exploring these libraries can be a difficult pro- searching and mining of music databases for production content cess. To address this, preliminary work is presented into the Groove is a common task. Producers frequently make use of assembled Explorer. Using Self-Organizing Maps, a large library of symbolic libraries of various different types of data, such as samples, loops, drum loops is automatically mapped on a 2D space according to synthesizer presents and virtual instruments.