MixMash: An Assistive Tool for Music Mashup Creation from Large Music Collections

摘要

This article presents MixMash, an interactive tool which streamlines the process of music mashup creation by assisting users in the process of finding compatible music from a large collection of audio tracks. It extends the harmonic mixing method by Bernardes, Davies and Guedes with novel degrees of harmonic, rhythmic, spectral, and timbral similarity metrics. Furthermore, it revises and improves some interface design limitations identified in the former model software implementation. A new user interface design based on cross-modal associations between musical content analysis and information visualisation is presented. In this graphic model, all tracks are represented as nodes where distances and edge connections display their harmonic compatibility as a result of a force-directed graph. Besides, a visual language is defined to enhance the tool's usability and foster creative endeavour in the search of meaningful music mashups.