This paper describes a novel music playback interface, called Musicream, which lets a user unexpectedly come across various musical pieces similar to those liked by the user. With most previous "query-by-example" interfaces used for similarity-based searching, for the same query and music collection a user will always receive the same list of musical pieces ranked by their similarity and op-
... [Show full abstract] portunities to encounter unfamiliar musical pieces in the collection are limited. Musicream facilitates active, flex- ible, and unexpected encounters with musical pieces by providing four functions: the music-disc streaming func- tion which creates a flow of many musical-piece enti- ties (discs) from a (huge) music collection, the similarity- based sticking function which allows a user to easily pick out and listen to similar pieces from the flow, the meta- playlist function which can generate a playlist of playlists (ordered lists of pieces) while editing them with a high degree of freedom, and the time-machine function which automatically records all Musicream activities and allows a user to visit and retrieve a past state as if using a time machine. In our experiments, these functions were used seamlessly to achieve active and creative querying and browsing of music collections, confirming the effective- ness of Musicream.