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IBM Glass Engine is an interesting concept of music exploration.
It allows you to explore the wonderful music of Philip Glass in various artistic planes.

Cataloguing works of Philip Glass is an ongoing project of IBM Glass Engine and it has been out for some time now.

It came to my attention at the ESWC 2005 workshop "Multimedia and the Semantic Web" where it was mentioned by mc schraefel during her keynote presentation.

Project's self-description: The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

What is so special about Glass Engine?

1) First, it has audio preview cues - quite large fragments of Glass' music that allows to get a feel of every part of his work. There are samples for each track present, it is not just one cue per CD.

2) Second, his work fragments are described based on a number of criteria that you can navigate through, using rulers in the application. There are 'exact' criteria like title of the work and track, work year and track length and 'artistic' criteria such as joy, sorrow or density.

This is what a Semantic Web community calls metadata or information about information [ a music track in our case ]. We can say that the creators of IBM Glass Engine have annotated Philip Glass' music by these criteria.

3) Third, within a single screen the application shows you a complete view of all Philip Glass' work. You get an interesting and exciting experience exploring his music and watching how navigation through one ruler 'realm' affects other rulers that change values according to the piece of music you are currently listening to.

This application may give you a different view how multi-model information can be accessed on a computer - a shift away from a file/folder organisation paradigm. And it allows you to enjoy and explore music during your day.

It might also be a good model for music companies to offer preview before you buy music.

Related:

- Philip Glass on this weblog
- This Is Not a Catalog: Philip Glass’s Works Online on IEEE Xplorer.

The only downside is that this application requires MS Internet Explorer or Apple OS 9, OS X platforms. But it is worthwhile trying out anyway!

By the way - has anyone got it running under Linux and Java VM?
The fact that they say it won't run doesn't mean it is impossible after all.