The World of Music

Figure 1. The Word of Music: 2D layout of artist-artist similarity graph

*Click on the image

Description:
The World of Music is a visualization graph made by David Gleich (Standford University), Matt Rasmussen (MIT), Kevin Lang (Yahoo! Reasearch), and Leonid Zhukov (Yahoo!, Inc.).
The aim is to create a visualization graph based on music artist rating data from Yahoo Music service.


Data:
From the 250 million ratings on 100,000 artists from 4 millions Yahoo users, during a 30 days period.

Figure 2. Data points embedded on the surface of 3D sphere.

Method: Layout Generation
1. Construct the nearest neighbor similarity graph.
2. Embed the graph on a sphere by solving an Semidefinite Programming (SDP).
3. Unroll the sphere for a 2d layout and visualize.

Figure 3. Zoomed in view of several clusters in layout.

Implementation:
Follow the link for further explanations http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~zhukov/infovis/The%20World%20of%20Music.pdf


Visualization Results:
Figure 1. Shows the layout generated by the system for Yahoo! Music services.
Figure 2 .Demonstrates the intermediate step with data projected on the sphere.
Figure 3. The enlarged version with some artist labels shown.

Provided information from:
http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~zhukov/infovis/world_of_music.htm