Visualizing Music Genres using a Topic Model

Abstract: Music Genres serve as an important meta-data in the field of music information retrieval and have been widely used for music classification and analysis tasks. Visualizing these music genres can thus be helpful for music exploration, archival and recommendation. Probabilistic topic models have been very successful in modelling text documents. In this work, we visualize music genres using a probabilistic topic model. Unlike text documents, audio is continuous and needs to be sliced into smaller segments. We use simple MFCC features of these segments as musical words. We apply the topic model on the corpus and subsequently use the genre annotations of the data to interpret and visualize the latent space.