Call for Papers

The annual conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) is the world’s leading research forum on processing, analyzing, searching, organizing and accessing music-related data. The 20th ISMIR conference, to be held in Delft, The Netherlands, welcomes contributions related to any aspect of Music IR, including foundations and theories for music processing, evaluation algorithms, applications, and analysis.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of ISMIR, we also open a special call for anniversary papers which reflect on the development of the field.

Important Dates

Time zone : Anywhere On Earth (AOE)

Abstract Submission, April 5, 2019
Final Submission, April 12, 2019
Notification of Acceptance, June 7, 2019
Camera-Ready Upload, June 28, 2019

There will be no extension to the submission deadlines. However, authors of registered papers on or before April 5th will be allowed to upload new versions of their papers until April 12th.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must comply with the following requirements:

  • Length (6+n pages): papers must contain at most 6 pages of scientific content (including figures and tables), with additional optional pages that contain only references and acknowledgments.
  • Templates: papers must be submitted in PDF format using the ISMIR 2019 templates (LaTex or Word). You may not manipulate the style files in any way.
  • File size: submitted PDF files must be at most 4MB in size. Please compress images and figures as necessary before submitting.
  • Originality: papers must be original contributions. They cannot have been published elsewhere nor currently submitted for publication anywhere else. All relevant work, including direct quotations from your own work, should be cited.
  • Submissions:
    • Submission system: We will use a different submission system, namely Microsoft CMT.
    • Supplementary material: In addition to the PDF file of the manuscript, authors will now be able to also upload supplementary files for their submission, such as audio samples, code or additional results. We strongly encourage authors to do this.
    • Main message: During submission, authors will be asked for ONE line of text stating the main take-home message of their work. This information will NOT be available to reviewers or meta-reviewers; it is intended to help organize cohesive sessions for the conference
  • Anonymity: ISMIR reviews are double-blind; authors and reviewers will be anonymous to each other. For the initial submission, please keep the author list from appearing in the text. Likewise, make any self-citations in the third person, although self-citations should be kept to a minimum. Note that acknowledgments should not be included in the anonymized submission.
  • Preprints: in order to maintain the legitimacy for our double-blind review process, we discourage authors from posting near duplicate manuscripts on public archives (technical reports, arXiv, etc.). If one of the reviewers detects the identity of the authors because of a preprint of the work on arXiv or elsewhere, the Program Chairs will try to find another reviewer (hoping this new reviewer will not find the preprint as well), but due to the time constraint of the reviewing process this might not be possible and hence the paper would not have time to be reviewed according to the double-blind policy of ISMIR. In the same spirit, to protect our double-blind reviewing process, authors need to make sure they do not promote their work in any way during the review process (social media, blog, mailing-list, etc.), since this may prevent preserving anonymity.

Submissions that deviate from any of the above requirements may be be automatically rejected.

Review Process

In order to ensure the quality of the papers published at the conference, all submissions will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

  • Novelty
  • Scholarly/scientific quality
  • Reusable insights
  • Stimulation potential
  • Appropriateness of topic
  • Importance
  • Readability and paper organization

This year we specially call for submissions that explicitly discuss reusable insights, that is, insights that may go beyond the scope of the paper, domain or application, ir order to build up consistent knowledge across the MIR community.

The reviewing workflow follows a two-tier model, i.e. with one level of “regular” reviewers, and another level of “meta-reviewers”. All papers are examined by at least three reviewers.

Accepted papers must be presented at the conference by one of the authors, and at least one of the authors must register before the deadline given for author registration (TBD). Failure to register before the deadline will result in automatic withdrawal of the paper from the conference proceedings and program.

Topics of Interest

ISMIR 2019 welcomes full-paper contributions to any aspect of Music IR. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • MIR data and fundamentals: music signal processing; symbolic music processing; metadata, tags, linked data, and semantic web; lyrics and other textual data, web mining, and natural language processing; multimodality.
  • Domain knowledge: representations of music; music acoustics; computational music theory and musicology; cognitive MIR; machine learning/artificial intelligence for music.
  • Evaluation and Methodology: philosophical and methodological foundations; evaluation methodology and reproducibility; statistical methods for evaluation; MIR tasks, datasets and annotation protocols; evaluation metrics.
  • Musical features and properties: melody and motives; harmony, chords and tonality; rhythm, beat, tempo; structure, segmentation and form; timbre, instrumentation and voice; musical style and genre; musical affect, emotion and mood; expression and performative aspects of music.
  • Music processing: sound source separation; music transcription and annotation; optical music recognition; alignment, synchronization and score following; music summarization; music synthesis and transformation; fingerprinting; automatic classification; indexing and querying; pattern matching and detection; similarity metrics.
  • User-centered MIR: user behavior and modeling; human-computer interaction and interfaces; personalization; user-centered evaluation; legal, social and ethical issues.
  • Applications: digital libraries and archives; music retrieval systems; music recommendation and playlist generation; music and health, well-being and therapy; music training and education; music composition, performance and production; gaming; business and marketing.

For additional information, you can reach the program chairs via email at ismir2019-papers@ismir.net.