Piotr D. Adamczyk. 2004. Seeing sounds: exploring musical social networks. In Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 512-515. DOI=10.1145/1027527.1027651 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1027527.1027651 Information gathering from multimedia retrieval systems is aided by effective visualization, but the degree to which visualization is effective depends in part on the way the context of the results is presented. When relationships represent media rich connections, static visualization alone may not be enough. This work explores how to represent context and utilize multimedia to convey a more accurate sense of search results. As a representative case, we explore various presentations of social networks formed by expert opinions of musical artist similarity. Our work extends research in information visualization and music retrieval to create a multimedia search experience. Three interactive presentation styles are used; graph-based 2D, Desktop 3D (VRML), and CAVE (immersive Virtual Reality). Visual models are augmented with spatial audio in 3D, and hyperlinks to sound files in 2D. Results of a preliminary user study of these styles are discussed along with implications for recommender system design.

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