Preface

Welcome to ISMIR 2018!

Dear ISMIR 2018 Attendees,

Sixteen years after its first venue in Paris in 2002, it is our great pleasure to welcome you back in the City of Lights for the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR). This year’s conference is organized by Télécom ParisTech and IRCAM.

ISMIR is the world's leading research forum on processing, searching, organizing and accessing music-related data. The success of ISMIR is continuously growing, as evidenced by the regular increase of its audience and the variety of its main program and satellite events. We have tried our best, with the invaluable help of our colleagues of the organizing committees and ISMIR board to maintain the tradition and spirit of previous editions while experimenting some new ideas for the scientific program, presentations and surrounding events.

We are excited to present this year’s program. A total of 235 complete and well-formatted papers entered the review process. Special care was taken to assemble an experienced and interdisciplinary review panel comprising people from many different academic and industrial institutions worldwide. As in previous years, reviews were double-blind (i.e., both the authors and the reviewers were anonymous) with a two-tier review model involving a pool of 269 reviewers, including a program committee (PC) of 60 members. Each paper was assigned to a PC member and three reviewers. The reviewers’ assignments were based on topic preferences, bidding on papers, and PC member assignments. Following the review phase, PC members and reviewers entered a discussion phase aiming to homogenize acceptance versus rejection decisions. Handling four submissions on average, each PC member was asked to adopt an active role in the review process by partaking inan intensive discussion phase with the other reviewers and providing a detailed meta-review. Final acceptance decisions were based on 940 reviews and meta-reviews. Of the 235 reviewed papers, 104 were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of 44.2%. The table shown on the next page summarizes the ISMIR publication statistics over the history of the conference. A very special thanks goes to our technical program chairs for their extensive efforts to ensure a fair and efficient paper selection.

For the first time at ISMIR, all papers will be presented both orally and as posters.

A number of other changes in the main program have also been implemented, in particular to have a specific and novel “Meetup with industry” event, which is organized at Station F, a large and emblematic business incubator for startups; and to host a dedicated exhibition of selected installations of Interactive Machine-Learning for Music.

Along with the main ISMIR program, we are happy to host a tutorial day and a number of satellite events including hackathons, workshops and web seminars.

We would like to thank the whole organizing committee for their dedication and invaluable help in setting up all the details of the conference. We are particularly grateful to all our sponsors who provided a considerable support to the conference - many thanks to them! And a very warm thanks to Blair Kaneshiro for her sustained efforts and actions towards our sponsors.

In short, welcome to Paris and have a fantastic ISMIR2018!

Geoffroy Peeters, Slim Essid and Gaël Richard, General Chairs

YearLocationOralPosterTotal
Papers
Total
Pages
Total
Authors
Unique
Authors
Pages/
Paper
Authors/
Paper
U. Authors/
Paper
2000Plymouth19163515568634.41.91.8
2001Indiana251641222100865.42.42.1
2002Paris3522573001291175.32.32.1
2003Baltimore2624502091321114.22.62.2
2004Barcelona61441055822522145.52.42
2005London57571146973162336.12.82
2006Victoria5936953972461984.22.62.1
2007Vienna62651274863612673.82.82.1
2008Philadelphia2410510563029625362.82.4
2009Kobe38851237293752925.932.4
2010Utrecht2486110656314263622.4
2011Miami3697133792395322632.4
2012Porto366510160632426463.22.6
2013Curitiba3167985873952365.932.4
2014Taipei337310663534327163.22.6
2015Málaga249011479237029673.22.6
2016New York City2588113781341270 6.93.02.4
2017Suzhou2473977163242487.43.32.6
2018Paris104104786337265 7.53.22.5

Tutorials

Eight tutorials will take place on Sunday, September 23rd 2018. There will be four parallel tutorials in the morning, and another four parallel tutorials in the afternoon. All tutorials will take place at Télécom ParisTech.

Morning Sessions:

Tutorial 1: Open Source and Reproducible MIR Research
Brian McFee, New York University
Thor Kell, Spotify

Tutorial 2: Computational Approaches for Analysis of Non-Western Music Traditions
Xavier Serra, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Martin Clayton, Durham University
Barış Bozkurt, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Tutorial 3: Statistical Analysis of Results in Music Information Retrieval: Why and How
Julián Urbano, Delft University of Technology
Arthur Flexer, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Tutorial 4: Music Separation with DNNs: Making It Work
Antoine Liutkus, Inria
Fabian-Robert Stöter, Inria

Afternoon Sessions:

Tutorial 5: Deep Learning for MIR
Alexander Schindler, Austrian Institute of Technology
Thomas Lidy, Musimap
Sebastian Böck, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Tutorial 6: Fundamental Frequency Estimation in Music
Rachel Bittner, Spotify
Alain de Cheveigné, CNRS
Johanna Devaney, City University of New York

Tutorial 7: Optical Music Recognition for Dummies
Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, McGill University
Jan Hajič jr., Charles University
Alexander Pacha, TU Wien
Ichiro Fujinaga, McGill University

Tutorial 8: Overview and New Challenges of Music Recommendation Research in 2018
Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Peter Knees, TU Wien
Fabien Gouyon, Pandora

Keynote Speakers

We are honored to have two distinguished keynote speakers:

Drawing sounds: Fourier, Kœnig, and Scott
Patrick Flandrin
Physics Department, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Using Data and Machine Learning to Support Human Musical Practices
Rebecca Fiebrink
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London

WiMIR Annual Meeting

Women in MIR (WiMIR) is a group of people in the MIR community dedicated to promoting the role of, and increasing opportunities for, women in the field. We meet to network, share information, and discuss in an informal setting the goal of building a community that supports women – and more broadly, diversity – in the field of MIR.

WiMIR has held annual meetings at the ISMIR conference since 2012, garnering a high turnout of both female and male attendees. Since 2016, WiMIR has also organized a mentoring program connecting female students, postdocs, and early-stage researchers to more senior females and male allies in the field.

At this year's ISMIR, we will have a special WiMIR cocktail during Tuesday, September 25th lunch followed by a special WiMIR session.

Unconference Evening

As in previous years, we will have a special “Unconference” in which participants break up into smaller groups to discuss Music-IR issues of particular interest. This is an informal and informative opportunity to get to know peers and colleagues from around the world. This year, the “Unconference” will last a whole evening, on Tuesday, September 25th at Télécom ParisTech.

Late-Breaking/Demo Session & Unconference Debriefing

Thursday morning is dedicated to late-breaking papers and Music-IR system demonstrations. Abstracts for these presentations are available online. After this session, the results of the discussions held during the unconference will be debriefed in a plenary session.

Meetup with Industry

The annual ISMIR (International Society for Music Information Retrieval) Conference is the world’s leading R&D forum for music tech since 2000. For the first time, the 2018 edition in Paris will include a Meetup with Industry, organized by Antescofo with support from Deezer and Pandora. This will be a unique networking platform, and a perfect opportunity to:

This will be a half-day event with networking activities and Industry talks, taking place on Thursday September 27, 2018, from 2PM to 6PM, at Station F, the biggest startup campus in the world, in the heart of Paris.

Satellite Events

This year, 6 satellite workshops will take place around ISMIR in various places (IRCAM, CNAM and Télécom ParisTech).

Social Events

In addition to the academic focus of ISMIR, we are offering a number of unique social events. The social program provides participants with an opportunity to relax after meetings, to experience Paris, and to network with other ISMIR participants. The social program includes:

Welcome Reception

The welcome reception will happen at the Balajo on Sunday September 23rd. The Balajo is a historical dancing-hall in the Bastille neighbourhood opened in 1936. It has welcomed many famous artists such as Mistinguett, Marlene Dietrich and Django Reinhardt. There, we will have a private concert of Gipsy Jazz music with hors d’oeuvres and drinks.

ISMIR Banquet and Jam Session

The banquet will happen Wednesday September 26th as a Seine river cruise buffet(with views over all the most famous Paris buildings). The cruise dock will be at the root of the Eiffel tower. The cruise will be concluded with the first ever ISMIR Jam Session on a boat.

Host City

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. Situated on the river Seine in the north of the country, it is in the center of the Île-de-France region, also known as the région parisienne, "Paris Region". It is home for the most visited art museum in the world, the Louvre, as well as the Musée d'Orsay, noted for its collection of French Impressionist art, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, a museum of modern and contemporary art. The notable architectural landmarks of Paris include Notre Dame Cathedral (12th century); the Sainte-Chapelle (13th century); the Eiffel Tower (1889); and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre (1914). In 2014 Paris received 22.4 million visitors, making it one of the world's top tourist destinations. Paris is also known for its fashion, particularly the twice-yearly Paris Fashion Week, and for its haute cuisine, and three-star restaurants.

Acknowledgments

We are very proud to present to you the proceedings of ISMIR 2018. The conference program was made possible thanks to the hard work of many people including the members of the organizing committee, the many reviewers and meta-reviewers from the program committee.

Special thanks go to this year’s sponsors:

Platinum Partners:

Gold Partners:
Silver Partners:
Bronze Partners:

We also gratefully acknowledge the sponsors who contributed specifically to the
Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMIR) initiatives and Student Travel awards:

Last but not least, the ISMIR program is possible only thanks to the excellent contributions of our community in response to our Call for Participation. The biggest acknowledgment goes to you, the authors, reviewers, researchers, and participants of this conference. We wish you a productive and memorable stay in Paris.


Emilia Gómez, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Xiao Hu, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Eric Humphrey, Spotify, USA
Emmanouil Benetos, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Program Chairs

Slim Essid, Télécom ParisTech, France
Geoffroy Peeters, IRCAM, France
Gaël Richard, Télécom ParisTech, France
General Chairs