ISMIR Keynote - Ten Years of Ismir
Ten years of ISMIR - Reflections on challenges and opportunities
Three founding fathers of ISMIR: J. Stephen Downie, Donald Byrd and Tim Crawford
Prehistoric background Tim Crawford described the early challenges in finding music and difficulties in using computers in the early days. Stephen talks about his early days as a flutist and his personal challenges in finding music from incipits and his strong bias for retrieval and evaluation instilled by his advisor.
In 1999, Don Byrd, working with Bruce Croft at UMASS, Tim working at Kings College in London got a grant to look at music information retrieval.
1999 - two conferences - ACM SIGIR + ACM Digital Libraries. Stephen organized an exploratory workshop on music information retrieval - that's where Stephen and Don met and proposed ISMIR. 13 August 1999 - ISMIR was born (in a bar in Berkley CA.)
ISMIR timeline:
1999 - MIR Workshop
2000 - First ISMIR - Plymouth MA - 88 Attendees, 11 different countries, 9 invited talks, 10 papers, 16 posters. Highlights: Beth Logan presents MFCCs, Tzanetakis and Cook: Marsyas, Foote: Arthur paper
2002 - switch symposium to conference - to make it easier to get funding
Growing collaborations. 50% of all papers are from 3 or 4 authors
2009 - ISMIR becomes the International Society of Music Information Retrieval
Evaluation History
1999 Trec-like evaluation proposed
2001 Bloomington meeting - manifesto for content providers to supply data
2002 / 2003 - funding from the Mellon corporation
2004 - Barcelona - MTG created the audio description contest
2005 - First MIREX
MIREX Breakdown
469 algorithm runs
129 - train/test machine learning tests
139 search tasks
22 unique tasks
16 tasks in audio domain
3 hybrid tasks
No symbolic tasks in 2009
ISMIR: External Success Factors - Audo Compression, growth of online audio, Standards like MPEG-7, dot.com bubble (Google for music)
ISMIR: Internal Success Factors: - Communications resources - the music-ir@ircam.fr mailing list and collected proceedings. Diversity in backgrouns in the steering committee, quality in programme chairs and committees. Policy of inclusiveness - not premised on high rejection rates, multiple avenues for presntation. General support for the Audio Description Contest and MIREX.
Five Key Challenges for ISMIR
Embracing Users - engage more with potential user-communities (performing musicians, film makers, musicologists, sound archivists, music eduatiors and music enthusiasts of all types)
Digging deeper into music itself- find the 'music' within the signal, move beyond simple timbral approaches, move beyond simgle features to create hybrid musically principled features, deeper understanding of what features mean musically, hybrid symbol and audio systems.
Increasing musial diversity - widen our horizons beyond western popular music
Rebalancing our music portfolio - Use audio 'symbolic' and (catalog) metadata together
Developing comprehensive MIR systems: work towards complete, usable, scalable systems, even if they are not perfect. In text IR world, prototype systems have been pivotal (smart, managing gigabytes, terrier
The Grand Challenge: Complete Systems
Something for people to use
Engage with our potential user-community
Users and humans music become more aware how humans hear music, listen to music respond to it and think about it.
New discipline of music informatics based in higher-level (human) query rather than low-level feature-matching
Challenges:
Need to find a way to encourage and reward development and improvement - to move things to the next level - problem is it is hard to publish something that is built on previous work but has no novel contribution
Academic vs. industrial priorities
Music retrieval vs multimedia retrieval we have a lot to learn from conferences like ACM MM.
IMPACT! - is the new academic Rock'n'roll - to get funding, must show impact, perhaps more important than publishing.