Category Programme announcements

Christos Plachouras
1st May 2026

Call for Papers: TISMIR Special Collection on Language-Centric Music Information Retrieval

We are pleased to announce a Call for Papers for a new Special Collection in the Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR) titled: “Language-Centric Music Information Retrieval”.

This special collection focuses on Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research informed by language-centered modeling. We invite contributions that explore how concepts and methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and large-scale language models can support the analysis, representation, retrieval, and generation of music.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
– Tokenization and representations for symbolic music and audio
– NLP for music-related text (lyrics, metadata, reviews, etc.)
– Language-informed tagging, classification, and semantic understanding
– Retrieval and recommendation, including query-by-description and conversational search
– Music generation and co-creation, including text-conditioned generation and iterative editing workflows
– Language-guided audio and music production, such as mixing, mastering, and sound design
– Knowledge resources for MIR, including ontologies, knowledge graphs, and entity linking
– Evaluation and human factors, including quality assessment, human feedback, creativity, bias, and cultural representation
– Trust, ethics, and transparency, including synthetic content detection and copyright-related considerations
– Long-context modeling of musical structure and form
– Multimodal methods involving text, symbolic music, and audio (as relevant to the collection’s focus)
 
Guest Editors:
– Anna Kruspe (Lead Editor), Munich University of Applied Sciences
– SeungHeon Doh, KAIST
– Elena Epure, Idiap Research Institute
– Yinghao Ma, Queen Mary University of London
– Arthur Flexer, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
– Li Su, Institute of Information Science
– Ruibin Yuan, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Submission Guidelines:
– Submission Link: https://transactions.ismir.net
– Note: Please specify in your cover letter that the submission is for the Special Collection “Language-Centric Music Information Retrieval”.
– Word Limit: Maximum 8,000 words.
– Pre-notification: If you plan to submit, please let us know via email at anna.kruspe@hm.edu to assist our planning.

For detailed formatting guidelines and information regarding extensions of previously published workshop research, please refer to the TISMIR website. We look forward to receiving your innovative contributions!

Best regards,
On behalf of the Guest Editors
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Christos Plachouras
7th October 2025

DMRN+20 one day workshop

DMRN+20 marks the 20th edition of DMRN. Moreover, this annual gathering has a history under other names, making it an institution that’s closer to 25 years old! This year, we celebrate that history and the ever-growing presence of music computing in and around London. In addition to the usual offering (top-notch research and a friendly, social atmosphere), we’ll also consider the past and future of DMRN, and the possible roles for a regionally organised network of this kind in the next few years. This event is hosted at KCL in collaboration with – but outside of – C4DM for the first time in many years, and takes the theme “Collaboration, Coordination, and Community”.

AIM has been a part of DMRN since 2018, with all cohorts presenting posters at the event. A few AIM students will surely be presenting this year as well.

 

Theme: “Collaboration, Coordination, and Community”.

This year’s theme is “Collaboration, Coordination, and Community”. You may like to include a nod to this theme in your submission (this is optional!) and/or in your chats with others at the event. For example, you might like to discuss research communities at both local (e.g., DMRN) and global (e.g., ISMIR) scales. Likewise, you might consider the wider music scholarship communities with which we sometimes have less interaction than we ought (e.g., ICMPC). And what about the much wider communities of musicians (professional and amateur) in London and beyond? What does successful collaborative, coordinated, and community-oriented work look like, and what might DMRN’s role be?

Tuesday 16th December 2025

🕚 10:00–17:00hrs
📍 King’s College London

More info: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/dmrn20/

Call for Contributions is already open.

Deadlines

  • 14 Nov 2025: Abstract submission deadline
  • 21 Nov 2025: Notification of acceptance
  • 15 Dec 2025: Registration deadline
  • 16 Dec 2025: DMRN+20 Workshop

See you there!

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Christos Plachouras
8th September 2025

The Creative Audio Synthesis and Interfaces Workshop

On 15 July, 2025, The Creative Audio Synthesis and Interfaces Workshop was held at Queen Mary University of London, organised by AIM COMMA Lab members Jordie Shier, Haokun Tian, and Charalampos Saitis, and supported by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM).

This one-day workshop included a series of talks exploring the intersection of creative audio synthesis and AI-enabled synthesizer programming.
Topics included evolutionary algorithms for sound exploration, synthesizer sound matching, timbre transfer, timbre-based control, reinforcement learning, differentiable digital signal processing, representation learning, and human-machine co-creativity.

Earlier this year, the AIM CDT visited the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo in Norway.
A shared interest in creative applications of audio synthesis and novel interface designs was established during this visit, motivating this follow-up workshop at QMUL.
Researchers from RITMO, The Open University, and the AIM CDT at QMUL were invited to
share their work, engage in critical discussion, and map directions for
future work. See below for a summary of talks with links to presentation recordings.

An evening concert showcased musical applications of technical implementations discussed during the workshop, grounding these discussions in real-world artistic contexts.

Invited Talks

Designing Percussive Timbre Remappings: Negotiating Audio Representations and Evolving Parameter Spaces

Facilitating serendipitous sound discoveries with simulations of open-ended evolution

Autonomous control of synthesis parameters with listening-based reinforcement learning

Can a Sound Matching Model Produce Audio Embeddings that Align with Timbre Similarity Rated by Humans?

GuitarFlow: Realistic Electric Guitar Synthesis From Tablatures via Flow Matching and Style Transfer

  • Jackson Loth — Queen Mary University of London

Timbre latent space transformations for interactive musical systems oriented to timbral music-making

Why Synthesizer Parameter Estimation Is Hard and How to Make it Easy

Perceptually Aligned Deep Image Sonification

Modulation Discovery with Differentiable Digital Signal Processing

Musical Performances and Demos

Experience Replay (Performance)

  • Vincenzo Madaghiele — University of Oslo

Weaving (Performance)

  • Balint Laczko — University of Oslo

Phylogeny (Demo)

  • Björn Thor Jónsson — University of Oslo
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