Music informatics

Music Informatics (MI) is an emerging interdisciplinary research area dealing with the production, distribution, and consumption of music through technology (especially in digital formats).

MI research topics include music technologies such as iPods, peer-to-peer application, digital audio editors, online music search engines and Music Information Retrieval (MIR); cognitive, social, and economic issues in music; as well as improvisation and music performance. MI studies this range of topics not only to better design music search and retrieval systems, but to develop a fundamental understanding of the nature of music and its associated behaviors as well. Because MI is an emerging discipline, it is a very dynamic area of research with many diverse viewpoints. The future of MI is yet to be determined.

Sub-topics in Music Informatics research

• Interdisciplinary relationships in Music Informatics
• The digital revolution in music its impact on music information services and music libraries
• Knowledge of current trends in music technologies including software and hardware
• Mental models in the cognition of music listening and performing
• Social and economic realities of the consumption of music in Western societies
• Improvisation in music, especially where it is facilitated by music technology
• Music digital libraries and collections architectures
• Future of music distribution, the music industry, and music libraries
• Music Information Retrieval
• Music Recommendation systems
• Studying and Synthesizing Music Expression
• Audio Signal-to-Score (singing, polyphonic, piano, etc.)
• Musical Analysis
• Musical Accompaniment Systems
• Score Following
• Optical Music Recognition (OMR)
• Music Source Separation
• Music for Computer Games
• MIDI to Symbolic Score

Music informatics in education

Music informatics, as a degree subject, offers a similar learning experience to music technology, but goes further into learning the principles behind the technology.^[1] Informatics students will not just use existing music hardware and software, but will learn programming and artificial intelligence.

See also

• Music Information Retrieval
• Generative music

References