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Music-Circles: Can Music Be Represented With Numbers?

The world today is experiencing an abundance of music like no other time, and attempts to group music into clusters have become increasingly prevalent. Common standards for grouping music were songs, artists, and genres, with artists or songs exploring similar genres of music seen as related. These clustering attempts serve critical purposes for various stakeholders involved in the music industry. For end users of music services, they may want to group their music so that they can easily navigate inside their music library; for music streaming platforms like Spotify, companies may want to establish a solid dataset of related songs in order to successfully provide personalized music recommendations and coherent playlists to their users. Due to increased competition in the streaming market, platforms are trying their best to find novel ways of learning similarities between audio to gain competitive advantage. Our team, comprised of music lovers with different tastes, was interested in the same issue, and created Music-Circles, an interactive visualization of music from the Billboard. Music-Circles links audio feature data offered by Spotify to popular songs to create unique vectors for each song, and calculate similarities between these vectors to cluster them. Through interacting with Music-Circles, users can gain understandings of audio features, view characteristic trends in popular music, and find out which music cluster they belong to.