Next week is the annual International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, known as ISMIR for short. It started out 8 years ago as a symposium in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Since then it has grown into a full-fledged conference, but the ISMIR name stuck.
This year’s conference is at Drexel University in Philadelphia from September 14 to 18. I will be doing a demonstration of “Using MusicXML 2.0 to Create Symbolic Music Data Sets” on Thursday between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm. This will be my first time presenting at ISMIR since MusicXML had its very first public presentation – in version 0.1 days – at the original symposium in 2000.
There are at least two other MusicXML-related presentations at the conference. The Sunday tutorial on “Symbolic Data for Music Applications” by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and Craig Sapp will include MusicXML, of course. On Thursday, Joachim Ganseman, Paul Scheunders, and Wim D’haes have a poster on “Using XQuery on MusicXML Databases for Musicological Analysis.” A few other papers and posters have MusicXML working behind the scenes, perhaps more so than in past years.
While most of ISMIR focuses on issues of audio music retrieval rather than symbolic / score / sheet music retrieval, recent years have had a very healthy percentage of work involving scores and sheet music. It is always fun to see everyone again and take in all the progress made in the past year. And it’s one of the best places to find other people who are seriously into both songs and schemas. I’m looking forward to it!