User Interface?

So far the SOMs are labeled with the song identifiers. Basically these maps could be used as user interfaces. Similar songs are located close together on the map and are identified by a string short enough to fit the width of a map unit. While these maps surely are a bigger help then a simple alphabetical list there are two major deficiencies.

The first is the lacking support trying to understand the cluster structure. It is rather difficult to recognize clusters on the first sight. Only after carefully studying Thus some visual support to identify clusters would be desirable.

The second deficiency derives from the assumption that the music collection and the contained pieces of music are unknown to the user, thus any information on artists or titles are not very useful for the user. To a user a map labeled with unknown music titles, interprets or authors might not be much more useful than randomly generated text. By far more interesting for the user would be some text, which explains what type of music is mapped to a map unit.