In a pre­vi­ous post about A Flat Hier­ar­chy for Sub­jec­tive mp3 Tags, I described the ardu­ous and mar­gin­ally reward­ing task of tag­ging my entire library with as many ‘tones’ tags as All­Mu­sic was able to pro­vide. With foobar2000 0.9 final now less than a week away, these tags may prove use­ful soon enough. But a few weeks ago, impa­tient and curi­ous, I decided to put them to another use:

By cre­at­ing a tones/tones tree struc­ture in foo­bar, I was able to count how often each ‘tone’ inter­sects with every other ‘tone.’ What you see above is the begin­ning of that data col­lec­tion, which I ulti­mately planned to ana­lyze in…some way.

After Googling around for ideas on tag clus­ter­ing, I came across gCLUTO, a free piece of soft­ware that would, mirac­u­lously, do exactly what I needed — namely, mag­i­cally fig­ure out how best to clus­ter each tag with related tags. I fig­ured four clus­ters would be a com­fort­able num­ber, based on ear­lier read­ing I had done on a two-axis the­ory of musi­cal emo­tion (intense/relaxed and positive/negative).

Unfor­tu­nately, my com­puter sim­ply couldn’t han­dle even con­struct­ing and decon­struct­ing the foo­bar tree with­out freez­ing up for about 45 min­utes each time. Plus, col­lect­ing all this data would have meant hours and hours of work, for a goal whose ben­e­fits weren’t very clear to me at all, as well as a halt in incor­po­rat­ing new down­loads into my library. It was a pretty excit­ing cou­ple days while it lasted though.