RAMA is a web application for visualizing and interacting with networks of music artists. It uses data of roughly 600000 artists and 3 million user tags, collected from Last.fm’s API. Data includes artists similarities, associated tags and popularity.
RAMA provides two simultaneous layers of information:

1. A map built from artist similarity data, modeled as a physical system using the framework Arbor.js
2. Overlaid labels containing user tags.

RAMA emphasizes commonalities as well as main differences between artists, users can interact with the graph in different ways, e.g. changing the graph complexity. Users can also edit graphs manually, removing some artists and expanding artist’s neighbors.
Through the use of YouTube’s API users can also listen to music while exploring the map. It is also possible to save songs into playlists that can be edited and exported to text files that can be loaded again in future uses of RAMA, or used in other applications.

System requirements

You will need access to the Internet and JavaScript enabled in your web browser.
So far, RAMA has been tested successfully with the following web browsers: Firefox 4.0 or greater, and Google Chrome. It also works on Safari with the exception of the playlist upload.

Contributors

• Fabien Gouyon
• Luis Sarmento
• Nuno Cruz
• Joana Fernandes Gomes
• Diogo Costa
• Bruno Gustavo Costa

Related papers

• Costa D., Gouyon F., Sarmento L. “RAMA: An Interactive Artist Network Visualization Tool.” Late-Breaking Demo Session, International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Kobe, 2009.
• Sarmento L., Gouyon F., Costa B., Oliveira E. “Visualizing Networks of Music Artists with RAMA.” International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, Lisbon, 2009.
• Costa B., Gouyon F., Sarmento L. “A Prototype for Visualizing Music Artist Networks.” International Conference on Digital Arts, Porto, 2008.