Music information retrieval (MIR) focuses on the research and development of computational systems to bring access to this type of big data closer to society. The International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) is a non-profit organization that promotes the exchange of ideas among its members, as well as a series of activities aimed at promoting research, development and teaching of all aspects of music information retrieval, the publication and distribution of studies, their dissemination, etc. Emilia Gómez, telecommunications engineer and director of the Music Information Research Lab of the Musical Technology Research Group (MTG) at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), UPF, was recently appointed president elect of ISMIR.

One of the main activities of ISMIR is to organize an annual international conference. Sixteen researchers from the Music Technology Group (MTG) participated at the 17^th edition that was held from 7 to 11 August in New York (USA).  A Congress that gathered between two and three hundred experts from around the world from academia and industry, with a scientific output  of some one hundred articles in each edition.

One of the novelties of ISMIR 2016 was the creation of a programme to promote the participation of women in this discipline, Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMir), whose presentation was entrusted to Emilia Gómez, one of its organizers. This year, the initiative included a programme of mentoring and economic input for women researchers, with the support of several companies such as Shazam, Smule and Amazon Music.

In addition, the MTG enjoyed major participation at ISMIR 2016. Sixteen researchers were involved presenting 11 research articles, two tutorials, two contributions to the initiative of MIREX evaluation and two studies presented at the international satellite symposium DLFM 2016 on digital libraries for musicology.

Reference works:

Authors, titles and research projects presented:

• Bogdanov, D., Porter A., Herrera P., & Serra X.  Cross-collection evaluation for music classification tasks.
• Bandiera, G., Romaní Picas O., & Serra X. Good-sounds.org: a framework to explore goodness in instrumental sounds.
• Dzhambazov, G., Srinivasamurthy A., Şentürk S., & Serra X. On the Use of Note Onsets for Improved Lyrics-to-audio Alignment in Turkish Makam Music.
• Gulati, S., Serrà J., Ganguli K. K., Şentürk S., & Serra X. Time-Delayed Melody Surfaces for Rāga Recognition.
• Bosch, J., Bittner R. M., Salamon J., & Gómez E. A Comparison of Melody Extraction Methods Based on Source-Filter Modelling.
• Oramas, S., Espinosa-Anke L., Lawlor A., Serra X., & Saggion H. Exploring Customer Reviews for Music Genre Classification and Evolutionary Studies.
• Font, F., & Serra X. Tempo Estimation for Music Loops and a Simple Confidence Measure.
• Nuanáin, C. Ó., Herrera P., & Jordà S. A User- Centred Evaluation Framework for Rhythmic Concatenative Synthesis.
• Bantula, H., Giraldo, S. & Ramirez, R. Jazz Ensemble Expressive Performance Modeling.
• McFee, B., Humphrey E. J., & Urbano J.  A Plan for Sustainable MIR Evaluation.
• Schedl, M., Eghbal-Zadeh H., Gómez E., & Tkalcic M. An analysis of agreement in classical music perception and its relationship to listener characteristics.

Tutorials in which they participated:

• Music Information Retrieval: Overview, Recent Developments and Future Challenges (organized by Emilia Gómez with the participation of Xavier Serra, director of the MTG).
• Natural Language Processing for MIR (organised by Sergio Oramas and with the participation of Luis Espinosa and deShuo Zhang).

Contributions to the DLFM 2016:           

The third edition of the International Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLFM 2016) Workshop was held parallel with the Congress, on 12 August.