Introduction to the Special Collection "20th Anniversary of ISMIR (original) (raw)

The 2005 Music Information retrieval Evaluation Exchange (MIREX 2005): Preliminary Overview

2005

This paper is an extended abstract which provides a brief preliminary overview of the 2005 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX 2005). The MIREX organizational framework and infrastructure are outlined. Summary data concerning the 10 evaluation contests is provided. Key issues affecting future MIR evaluations are identified and discussed. The paper concludes with a listing of targets items to be undertaken before MIREX 2006 to ensure the ongoing success of the MIREX framework.

Strengthening Interdisciplinarity in MIR: Four Examples of Using MIR Tools for Musicology

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field. Nonetheless, a number of presentations at previous ISMIR conferences have noted that there are some fields to which MIR seems to have a natural connection but with which there have been relatively fewer collaborations. Musicology is one of the most commonly cited fields where there are good opportunities for more interaction with MIR, and this paper presents four examples of using fundamental MIR concepts and software tools (the MIR and MIDI toolboxes) to start such collaborations. The four examples cover a wide range of musicological periods, from religious chant to 20th-century pop music, and also a wide range of MIR techniques, from concepts based on symbolic data to audio-only methods that avoid the concept of a musical score altogether. We hope that other researchers may extend or adapt our examples to answer their own musicological questions and foster their own collaborations between MIR and musicology.

Digital Musicology and MIR: Papers, Projects and Challenges

2013

In this paper we report on the ISMIR 2013 Demo and Late Breaking Session entitled Digital Musicology and MIR. Five papers were discussed as examples of interesting MIR contributions to musicology. Two important projects, Transforming Musicology and CompMusic, were briefly presented. Finally, this paper reports the first results of a questionnaire about challenges from Digital Musicology for MIR research. The most important outcomes are that lack of suitable musical data is still an important obstacle and that there is a great demand for tools and methods that make integrated access and analysis of symbolic and audio data possible.

Music Information Retrieval and Contemporary Classical Music: A Successful Failure

2020

This paper is about the story of my relationship, as a contemporary music composer, with computational tools that are situated in the areas of signal processing, machine learning and music information retrieval (MIR). I believe that sharing this story can be useful to the MIR community since it illustrates the problems that can arise when you try to use these techniques in the context of contemporary music creation. Since this is a personal story, I will refer to experiences that I had during about fifteen years of usage of MIR-related technologies. I will show how these technologies tried to (unsuccessfully) shape my musical thinking and why I believe that some of them have come to an end. Finally, I will propose new possible directions for the future of MIR.

ISMIR 2004 audio description contest

… Technology Group of …, 2006

In this paper we report on the ISMIR 2004 Audio Description Contest. We first detail the contest organization, evaluation metrics, data and infrastructure. We then provide the details and results of each contest in turn. Published papers and algorithm source codes are given when originally available. We finally discuss some aspects of these contests and propose ways to organize future, improved, audio description contests.

Content-Based Music Information Retrieval (CB-MIR) and Its Applications toward the Music Industry

ACM Computing Surveys, 2018

A huge increase in the number of digital music tracks has created the necessity to develop an automated tool to extract the useful information from these tracks. As this information has to be extracted from the contents of the music, it is known as content-based music information retrieval (CB-MIR). In the past two decades, several research outcomes have been observed in the area of CB-MIR. There is a need to consolidate and critically analyze these research findings to evolve future research directions. In this survey article, various tasks of CB-MIR and their applications are critically reviewed. In particular, the article focuses on eight MIR-related tasks such as vocal/non-vocal segmentation, artist identification, genre classification, raga identification, query-by-humming, emotion recognition, instrument recognition, and music clip annotation. The fundamental concepts of Indian classical music are detailed to attract future research on this topic. The article elaborates on the...

The Games We Play: Exploring the Impact of ISMIR on Musicology

ISMIR, 2023

Authors: Vanessa Nina Borsan, Mathieu Giraud, Richard Groult. Throughout history, a consistent temporal and spatial gap has persisted between the inception of novel knowledge and technology and their subsequent adoption for extensive practical utilization. The article explores the dynamic interaction and exchange of methodologies between musicology and computational music research. It focuses on an analysis of ten years’ worth of papers from the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) from 2012 to 2021. Over 1000 citations of ISMIR papers were reviewed, and out of these, 51 later works published in musicological venues drew from the findings of 28 ISMIR papers. Final results reveal that most contributions from ISMIR rarely make their way to musicology or humanities. Nevertheless, the paper highlights four examples of successful knowledge transfers between the fields and discusses best practices for collaborations while addressing potential causes for such disparities. In the epilogue, we address the interlaced origins of the problem as stemming from the language of new media, institutional restrictions, and the inability to engage in multidisciplinary communication.

New Developments in Music Information Retrieval

The digital revolution has brought about a massive increase in the availability and distribution of music-related documents of various modalities comprising textual, audio, as well as visual material. Therefore, the development of techniques and tools for organizing, structuring, retrieving, navigating, and presenting music-related data has become a major strand of research—the field is often referred to as Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Major challenges arise because of the richness and diversity of music in form and content leading to novel and exciting research problems. In this article, we give an overview of new developments in the MIR field with a focus on content-based music analysis tasks including audio retrieval, music synchronization, structure analysis, and performance analysis.