Special Session 1: MIR for Human Health and Potential Panel
The MIR for Human Health and Potential Panel brings together researchers from music, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, mathematics, and computer science to continue discussion of a topic which began at ISMIR2014. This topic has become increasingly important, especially during an unprecedented global pandemic which has significant impacts on people’s health, wellbeing and learning, as their interactions with others are restricted due to social distancing measures.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made music more important as a medium to connect people, to enhance both physical and mental health, and to advance human potential. Social distancing measures have greatly enhanced interest in eHealth and eLearning. Integrating music into digital health/learning technologies helps to make music interventions accessible, scalable, and personalized. Finally, these technological innovations offer effective interventions for health, wellbeing and learning that are safe and non-invasive.
Research at the intersection of neuroscience, medicine, the science of learning, and MIR has the potential to reveal new insights into individual variability and personalized interventions; while mobile systems for collecting physiological data point to promising avenues for ecologically valid studies, and even socially distanced data collection in the home.
Time: 3:30-4:30 AM on November 9, 2021 (UTC)
Moderator: Ye Wang (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Panelists: Frank Russo (Ryerson University, Canada), Elaine Chew (CNRS – STMS (IRCAM), France), Gus Xia (NYU Shanghai, China), Blair Kaneshiro (Stanford University, USA)
Special Session 2: IMS Digital Musicology Study Group
This meeting of the International Musicological Society’s Digitial Musicology Study Group is open to anyone interested in applying computational methods to musicological questions. The meeting will consist of a series of short presentations about ongoing research projects as well as a general discussion about the future activities of the group.
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM on November 9, 2021 (UTC)
Moderators: Johanna Devaney (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA) and Frans Wiering (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Special Session 3: Promoting Cultural Diversity in MIR Research
Promoting cultural diversity in MIR research has been recognized by the MIR community as an important task. ISMIR 2021 is proud of having organized a special call-for-papers on cultural diversity, with an outcome of eleven papers accepted. The goal of this session is to reflect on this effort and to discuss how to promote cultural diversity in MIR research in a sustainable manner.
Time: 4-5 AM on November 10, 2021 (UTC)
Moderator: Scientific Program Co-Chairs
Panelists: Magdalena Fuentes (New York University, USA), Xiao Hu (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong), Patrick Savage (Keio University SFC, Japan), Li Su (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
Special Session 4: Computational Creativity for Music
This panel on Computational Creativity for Music will begin by discussing definitions of AI, CC, and what panelists perceive as important differences between the two. Portrait XO will reflect on an artist’s experience of incorporating algorithms into the creative process – what works, what doesn’t. We will address evaluation, especially work the academics have done to address how we could/should evaluate computational systems and their outputs. Is it sufficient for a machine learning paper to rely solely on metrics such as loss/cross-entropy for evaluation? We will get the panelists’ points of view on this, and provide a useful reading list for ISMIR authors aiming to excel at evaluating their creative MIR research.
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM on November 10, 2021 (UTC)
Moderator: Tom Collins (University of York, UK, Music Artificial Intelligence Algorithms, Inc., USA)
Panelists: Anna Jordanous (University of Kent, UK), Dan Ventura (Brigham Young University, USA), Geraint Wiggins (VUB, Belgium / Queen Mary University of London, UK), and Portrait XO (Artist)
Special Session 5: MIR for Music Education
Computer technology, and MIR in particular, has inspired many innovations in music education, including pitch recognition for singers, score alignment for performance evaluation and AI assistants for student composers. We will discuss the potential of MIR for the future of music education as well as how the needs of music educators can guide MIR research.
Time: 4-5 PM on November 10, 2021 (UTC)
Moderator: Roger Dannenberg (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Panelists: Zhiyao Duan (University of Rochester, USA), Anssi Klapuri (Yousician, Finland), Alexander Lerch (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA), Daniel Ray (Muse Group, UK)
Special Session 6: Ethical issues in Music AI - Perspectives on authorship with creative artificial intelligence in music
In the wake of all the exciting opportunities that creative AI technology provides artists, a more contentious issue is emerging: that of authorship. Who can or should be denominated as the author of a work created or co-created alongside AI systems? What is the role of the cultural commons from which ML systems draw their creative energies, especially in situations involving precarious minorities or cultural heritage groups vulnerable to exploitation? How do copyright or related neighbouring rights approach authorship and ownership in these contexts? How can revenue streams generated by the creative Ai works be allocated in a fair and sustainable manner? And finally, what consequences will these choices have for the creative artists, for the industry and for the society at large?
In this session, we will not provide easy answers to these questions, but start exploring them by mapping out authors, owners and stakeholders in various contexts of music production, performance and consumption. Through the identification of the networks of influence, power and exclusion, we can start exposing the ethical ecosystems and the shifting contours of authorship in the AI music industry.
We aim to conduct parts of this session in a workshop format, facilitating an open discussion with the audience.
Time: 2.30-3.30 PM on November 11, 2021 (UTC)
Moderators: Andre Holzapfel (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), Petra Pauliina Jääskeläinen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), Anna-Kaisa Kaila (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)