At ISMIR 2009 the MTG will have the biggest participation ever, including 3 oral presentations, 6 posters, 1 special talk, 5 demos, and 7 successful entries to MIREX.

The 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, to be held this year in Kobe, Japan, from October 26th to 30th, is the reference conference for those researchers working in automatic music description and annotation, content and context analysis of music, automatic transcription, music recommendation or playlist generation.

The MTG has been present there since the very first edition held in Plymouth, MA, in 2000, and we even organized here in Barcelona the 2004 edition. The research field gained momentum some years ago, and now it seems that we are recollecting some fruits for all those effort because the current edition it will count with an impressive participation of MTG members and contributions. In the oral presentations track, we will present

• "Music and geography: content description of musical audio from different parts of the world" by Emilia Gómez, Martín Haro & Perfecto Herrera
• "Music Mood Representations From Social Tags" by Cyril Laurier, Mohamed Sordo, Joan Serrà & Perfecto Herrera, and
• "Scalability, generality and temporal aspects in automatic recognition of predominant musical instruments in polyphonic music", by Ferdinand Fuhrmann, Martín Haro & Perfecto Herrera.

In poster sessions we will show

• "On the use of harmony and first order logic for automatic genre classification of audio files" by Amélie Anglade, Rafael Ramirez and Simon Dixon,
• "SongExplorer: a tabletop application for exploring large collections of songs" by Carles F. Julià and Sergi Jordà,
• "From Low-Level to Song-Level Percussion Descriptors of Polyphonic Music" by Martin Haro and Perfecto Herrera,
• "Unsupervised detection of cover song sets: Accuracy improvement and original identification" by Joan Serrà, Massimiliano Zanin, Cyril Laurier, and Mohamed Sordo,
• "A quantitative evaluation of a two stage retrieval approach for a melodic query by example system" by Justin Salamon, Martin Rohrmeier, 
• "Music Mood and Theme Classification - A Hybrid Approach" by Claudiu Firan, Cyril Laurier, Raluca Paiu and Kerstin Bischoff.

Reaching the 10th edition of a conference calls for some maturity in the discipline and also acts as a trigger for self-reflection. As a consequence, a special session on the future of MIR has been scheduled and it will be hosting an oral presentation titled

• "The discipline formerly known as MIR" by Perfecto Herrera, Joan Serrà, Cyril Laurier, Enric Guaus, Emilia Gómez and Xavier Serra.

Demos will also be present there with:

• "Assessing the Results of a Cover Song Identification System with coverSSSSearch" (Joan Serrà),
• "Mood Cloud 2.0: Music Mood Browsing based on Social Networks" (Cyril Laurier, Mohamed Sordo, Perfecto Herrera),
• "PHAROS: An Audiovisual Search Platform using Music Information Retrieval Techniques" (Cyril Laurier, Mohamed Sordo, Alessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, et al.),
• "MyMTV: A Personalized and Interactive Music Channel" (Oscar Mayor, Owen Meyers, Cyril Laurier, Markus Koppenberger), and
• "QueryBag: Using Different Sources For Querying Large Music Collections" (Mohamed Sordo, Òscar Celma, Cyril Laurier).

To conclude, the fifth running of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX), a worldwide evaluation of algorithms addressed to MIR-related problems, also counted with excellent submissions from our lab. Among the 16 proposed problems (including query by singing, beat detection, chord detection, or melody extraction), we participated in 7 and, as the table shows, we achieved top-ranking results:

All available results (also from other tasks) are here: http://www.music-ir.org/mirex/2009/index.php/MIREX2009_Results

There are short descriptions of the MTG submissions for the classification tasks, for the cover task and for the similarity and retrieval task. The MTG involved team included J. Serrà, M. Zanin and R. Andrzejak (Cover Song Identification), N. Wack, E. Guaus, C. Laurier, O. Meyers, R. Marxer, D. Bogdanov, J. Serrà, and P. Herrera (for the Composer Identification, Mood and Genre Classification), and D. Bogdanov, J. Serrà, N. Wack, and P. Herrera for the Music Similarity task. All these results will be presented by means of posters in a special session devoted to MIREX results.

ISMIR 2009 Program