I spend most of my days and nights in front of the computer screen. Needless to say I listen to countless hours of music. I’m always looking for new music to listen to, and face it, iTunes can only get you so far with it’s rather limited discovery features. Recently, I’ve turned to relational, and visual music discovery engines to find more tunes that related to my current musical tastes.

The basic premiss behind this new breed of music search is that you start by entering a genre, artist, song, or geo-location, and you are returned music that relates to your search term. In most cases the returns are presented as a visualization in order to show the connections between data.

Below you find a list of the sites that I go to when I’m trying to find new music. If you know of any music discovery sites that are not listed please post them in the comments section. Thanks!

Artist Network Visualization
The Artist Network Visualization applet shows the current listening activity of MyStrands users. Every time a user plays a track by a recognizable artist, it will show up on the map as a small circular node (along with the album art of whichever album the track belonged to). The nodes will repel each other away, so that they don’t overlap each other. However, if two or more artists are played consecutively, they will become visibly “linked” and follow each other around the map when clicked and dragged. Watch as networks of artists emerge from our users’ listening behavior.

Audiosurf: Ride Your Music
As the company states, “Audiosurf allows you to experience the intensity and emotion of your songs in real time, in full color, and in 3D. Songs that give you an adrenaline rush are converted into wild roller coaster rides full of color and motion. Songs that calm you down appear as cool colors against a relaxing sky. Audiosurf enhances the experience of your music collection by synchronizing its environment to the events in your songs–the beats, the intense sections, the long pauses followed by a burst of sound, all take on a more vivid meaning. The application builds a highway for any music CD, MP3, iTunes M4A, WMA, or OGG song you choose, so the experience that you have is totally up to you.”

Liveplasma Music Discovery Engine
Liveplasma is a music and movie discovery engine that shows you new music depending on what your interested in. “Data is grouped according to interest, style, epoch and other criteria which suggest that someone will like it. The closer a film or band is to your favorite the greater the chances are that you will like it.

Musicovery – Content Visualization
As a web application designer I’m always looking for new ways to visualize information and content. Musicovery has showed us a different way of visualizing and browsing music. While the menu is a standard set of music categories, the browse interface itself is like a map with your genre of music displayed in a map-like drag enabled environment. You can drag the music map around your genre until you find an interesting artist. Then when you click on their name the artist is repositioned to the center of the map and the music start playing, along with some nice visual effects.

Musiclens – Music Discovery Visualization
There are many search tools for finding new music on the web. Just type in, “artist, genre or title and you’ll find some results. Ho Hum. I’ve been forced to use this same music search paradigm for years. However, there is a new breed of music sites cropping up that will give you new ways to discover new music. “Musiclens enables users to find pieces of music using very vaguely described criteria, such as loudness (perceived volume), mood or purpose. The search or recommendation query can be enhanced or limited by adjusting the ten navigation control sliders”. This site works well and has a great visualization tool.

Music Maps – Who is Listening to What and Where
“The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world.” I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site.

Podbop – Mp3 Concert Calendar

“Podbop is an MP3 concert calendar that helps you discover bands playing in your town, completely powered by the community”. Excellent use of color, oversized text, and a well designed map navigator are highlights of the Podbop start page. The interior uses the same high contrast and highly readable layout. The dark brown and lime green work well together with the white font. The site has a great user experience with inline previews of the band’s mp3’s categorized by date and location.

TuneGlue – Relationship Explorer
TuneGlue is music relationship visualization. The application lets you type in an artist and TuneGlue will return all of the artists it can find related to your search. By clicking on the artist button, and then release, the app will show all of the releases by this artist.

ScreenVader – Algorithmic Music, Images and Video
In many ways this site feels like an exploration. There is no about section or faqs, so when you arrive you’re not really sure what to expect. As I found out, it turned out to be a wonderful visual experience. The site provides several free software packages that allow you to compose algorithmic music, image and video presentations. The results are stunning as you will see from the examples on the site. While it takes a little getting use to, the flash based navigation is fun easy to use. The downloads are available for Mac and PC.

Whitney Music Box – Visual Harmony
A very fluid music visualization based on the film maker John Whitney. As the developer stated, “This weekend I’ve been playing, once again, with the ideas of experimental film pioneer John Whitney, using both graphics and audio. While Whitney was interested in turning musical ideas into motion graphics, I’m doing the inverse – turning one of his key animation ideas back into music. Whitney made a number of films based around the simple idea of harmonic relationships. Above is a visual example of one his ideas that I implemented in Flash.” Make sure you check out all of the variations in the right column. Great project.

I really like to search the web. I search because I’m curious. I search because I need specific information. When I need to find something specific I still go to Google. When I’m curious, and searching for entertainment sake I go to visual, faceted, and relational search engines. There are many ways to search the web these days that are not just liner. Today searches can now be based on context, color, relationship, and even child safe content.

The following is a list of some of the best examples of visual search engines. My comments are now moderated, however, if you have search that you think should be included in this list please leave a comment. Also, if you have a spot on criticisms or relevant information about any app that was posted I also value your comment. Thanks to the developers of these searches for a new way to see what’s out there on the inter-web.

Etsy’s Color Product Search Visualization
While I’ve seen several color based searches they are usually for images. Etsy has created a color based search for products which gives you results based on colors you select in their easy to navigate color grid. To use the search just mouse over the color grid and click on the color. Then click the item to get a closer look and some more details. If you are interested in this item and want to find out more just click the item title. From there you can purchase the selected item.

Faceted Search by Moritz Stefaner
Project Search v1 by Moritz Stefaner is a a flash demo of a faceted search application for architectural projects. I find this form of search very useful for drilling down into a subject. The project has great interaction design.

Grokker – Relational Search Visualization

Relational search engines help you find more of the information you are looking for faster than with a traditional liner meta search. Grokker does a good job at relational search by federating content from Yahoo and Wikipedia. The results page has two main views which are a list view and a map view. The list view is interesting because it shows you a collapsable / expandable outline view of the categories, and a detail view. It also give you some tools to narrow your search such as a date slider, view by either Yahoo, Wikipedia or both, by keyword within the outline, and finally, by domain. The map view gives you the same tools with an expanded visualization map of the results and relationships. Very fun, easy to use, and great for discovering related results.

Kart00 – Visual Search
Kartoo is a meta search engine which presents its results on a map. To try it enter your request and click on the “OK” button. As soon as you launch a search, Kartoo analyses your request, questions the most relevant engines, selects the best sites and places them on a map. In this map, the found sites are represented by more or less important size pages, depending on their relevance. When you move the pointer over these pages, the concerned keywords are illuminated and a brief description of the site appears on the left side of the screen. A series of keywords appears. You can refine your search by clicking subjects. To go to the next map, click on the “map nb x” button.

oSkope – Visual Search
If you frequent websites like Amazon, YouTube, flickr and eBay you probably love the mass of content that you can see at sites like these. As a designer I tire of “sameness” in ways to browse websites. With the exception of flickr the only way to browse the content on these sites is the all to common linear list view. oSkope gives you another. As they say on their website, “oSkope is a search assistant with a highly intuitive visual interface. oSkope lets you browse quickly through a large number of images a preview information with minimal paging. Selected items can be saved by registered users.” In many of my test searches I found the information or product I was looking for much more quickly than on the websites themselves. While I can save individual products in a folder I also wish I could save searches. The product is still in beta, however, it is a very fun, intuitive and functional way to search the selected websites. Thanks to the developers and designers.

Quintura Search Visualization
Quintura is a tag cloud based visual search engine. After your initial search you’re presented with a two pane screen. On the left is grouping of tags that are related to your search term. On the right are standard liner search results. From an interaction standpoint I think the combination works well. In one screen I get readable results and suggested related search terms. You can also embed your search term cloud on your own website.

Quintura Kids – Child Friendly Search Visualization
If you have children you know that many search engines retrieve sites you may not want them to see. If you’re a kid you know how boring most search engines can be. “Quintura, Inc. is the next-generation web search company that was launched with a mission to make Web search easier and faster by adding context or meaning to keywords and visualizing search. The patent-pending technology of Quintura is based on over a decade of the founders’ innovative research and development in the area of neural network and artificial intelligence”. Quintura also has a wonderful search for standard use, and a women’s version is planned soon. So far I love both versions that are public.

Searchme – Visual Search Engine

Searchme is new search visualization which lets you see the webpage before you surf there. The idea is pretty neat. As you start to enter a search term you are shown a list of categories that are associated with that term. You can either choose a category, or search all categories. The results are shown in “coverflow” paradigm. You can still sort by category, or just click though the “coverflow” of all of the pages. I love the idea and the execution, however, from a user interface perspective there are a few interactions that would help the UI a great deal. For example, a full screen mode would make seeing the webpages much more useful. Even with a 30 inch Apple HD monitor the pages are a little hard to read. If searchme added a high-rez full screen mode or a way to magnify the page images it would give me a way to see the page relevance to my search. One step beyond that would be to show the highlighted search term(s) on each page as it flew by. Props out to the developers/designers! In my opinion it just needs a little UX love and then we could have a real winner.

Snap – Search Visualization
Recently new forms of search visualization have been on the rise. Snap is a great example of a new way to view search results. The applications allows you to view an image of the page your about to visit before you go there. The site is broken into two panes one with the search results and the other with a screenshot of the page. In the screenshot pane you can choose three different sizes of screenshots. You can view the site with either a new window or in the larger left pane. As a visual person I found it to be a fun way to browse search results.

TouchGraph Google Browser
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites. Use this free Java application to explore the connections between realted website.