Celebrating The 10th Anniversary:
Increasing Diversity And Toward The Future

The 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference will take place October 26-30, 2009 (Monday through Friday), in Kobe, Japan. Looking at the recent rapid growth of ISMIR conferences since its inception in 2000 and the expansion of the music information retrieval (MIR) community, MIR people may no longer consider acronym MIR as "music information retrieval" in the strict sense, but rather think that MIR essentially fits "music information research" in a broad sense. Correspondingly, MIR also draws considerable attention from other research/application fields. ISMIR therefore aims to open a new horizon of the exchange and discussion of ideas, issues, results, and perspectives for people of widespread areas, such as representatives of academia, industry, entertainment, and education, including researchers, developers, educators, librarians, students, and professional users. Alongside presentations of original theoretical research and practical work, ISMIR provides introductory and in-depth tutorials, and a venue for the showcase of current MIR-related products and systems.

To foster MIR, every time previous ISMIR was held, we have been making attempts and learning from experiences. New changes would be introduced to ISMIR 2009, while some effective part of ISMIR 2008 would be inherited with minor revisions. What are inherited from ISMIR 2008 include:

• Rebuttal phase during paper selection,
• Uniform paper status for all accepted submissions, and
• Late breaking / demo session.

The topic areas and the emphasis on higher quality and wider interdisciplinary research and scholarship in all aspects of MIR remain unchanged. Novel and previously unpublished submissions are solicited in areas including, but not limited to, the following:

• content-based querying and retrieval
• database systems, indexing, and query
• fingerprinting and digital rights management

• transcription and annotation
• music signal processing
• score following and audio alignment
• optical music recognition

• melody and motives
• rhythm, beat, tempo, and form
• harmony, chords, and tonality
• timbre, instrumentation and voice
• performance analysis
• modification and transformation of music data

• computational musicology
• perception and cognition
• emotion and aesthetics
• applications of MIR to the performing arts and multimedia

• automatic classification
• genre, style, and mood
• similarity metrics
• music summarization

• user interfaces and user models
• music recommendation and playlist generation
• text and web mining
• knowledge representation, social tags, and metadata
• libraries, archives and digital collections

• evaluation and annotation issues
• methodological and philosophical issues
• social, legal, ethical, and business issues

In addition to research papers, we also solicit late-breaking / demo submissions, and proposals for tutorials, and exhibits. More details on each category are provided below.

All papers will be peer-reviewed according to their novelty, technical content, presentation, and contribution to the overall balance of topics and disciplines represented at ISMIR 2009. Papers that introduce new topics and methods to MIR research are particularly welcome. Paper submissions should satisfy the following conditions:

• Formatting must comply to the guidelines and templates that will be available on the submission web page (http://ismir2009.ismir.net/submission/ will be open in early-January).
• Submitted papers must be between 4 and 6 pages long.
• Papers should include a 150-200 word abstract.
• Submission must consist of original contributions (not previously published and not currently being considered for publication elsewhere).
• There is no limitation on the number of submissions per author.
• The rebuttal phase will take place during June 26th - July 3rd.
• Accepted papers will be designated either as poster-only presentations, or as oral talks without poster presentations.
• Authors of accepted papers will be asked to provide camera-ready copies of their papers.
• If accepted, authors are encouraged to bring laptop computers or other appropriate equipment to supplement their presentations.
• For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for the ISMIR 2009 conference prior to submission of the camera-ready version.

There will be no submission categories of papers. Judgement of acceptance will be made based purely on the paper quality relative to the other papers; all accepted papers will be allotted up to six pages in the proceedings. Although authors can indicate preference for oral or poster presentation upon submission, the program committee will decide the most effective way of presenation (oral presentation or poster presentation) based on the nature of the paper and interest to the broader MIR community as well as scheduling constraints. The presentation format has no relation to the reviewer judgment of paper quality and will be determined after the acceptance judgement. Poster authors are expected to give a 30-second presentation of their work as part of the "madness" session before each poster session.

ISMIR 2009 will have the best paper award, the best student paper award, and the presentation award (new). The presentation award will have two subcategories, oral and poster, which will be selected by votes collected during the conference.

A special session during the ISMIR 2009 schedule (the morning of October 30) will be dedicated to:

• the presentation of preliminary results and ideas that are not yet fully formed nor systematically evaluated; and
• the demonstration of applications that are of interest to the MIR community.

These late-breaking / demo submissions will not be reviewed and will not be included in the proceedings of the conference. Thus, they have been assigned a late deadline (August 31 24:00 (JST)).

For submission, please upload to the online submission system an A4 one-page PDF file containing the title, author(s) and affiliation(s), and an abstract outlining the work to be presented. Figures and tables may be included if necessary. The PDF files will be published online, but will not be included in the ISMIR 2009 proceedings. If the number of submissions exceeds the size dictated by the available presentation space, submissions that contribute to a balanced session will be given priority.

If the confirmation of the presentation to be made at the conference is necessary before the deadline of early registration (August 10), please submit your PDF file and let me know it a.s.a.p.

The first day of the conference (October 26) will consist of a parallel session of tutorials each concentrating on a single topic presented either at an introductory level or in depth, lasting about 3 hours (including a break). Submissions should consist of a 1-4 page abstract including:

• Title
• Outline of the tutorial content
• Intended and expected audience
• Short biography of the presenter(s)
• Any special requirements
• Contact information

The document should be sent as a pdf attachment via email to by January 31, 2009.

Acceptance/rejection decisions will be made by the ISMIR 2009 Conference Committee. The decision will depend on the criteria including relevance, suitability, originality, and expertise of the presenter(s). Acceptance/rejection of a proposal will be noticed before February 28, 2009.

Throughout ISMIR 2009, space will be available for publishers, software companies, booksellers, service providers, system vendors, and any other businesses interested in exhibiting their MIR-related products. They are invited to contact the program committee via email to regarding the ISMIR bookstore and/or exhibition space before August 31.

We look forward to seeing you in Kobe!

General Chairs:
Masataka Goto, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Ichiro Fujinaga, McGill University

Program Chairs:
George Tzanetakis, University of Victoria
Keiji Hirata, NTT Communication Science Laboratories