INESC TEC project leads to Music Technology roadmap and festival

INESC TEC project leads to Music Technology roadmap and festival

Completed last year at INESC TEC’s Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM), European Project MIReS - Music Information ReSearch focused on the future impact that research in music technology has on industry and academia. And the project has already left a mark – in addition to a roadmap of research in the area, the project originated the Music Tech Fest, which next year will be expanded to eight countries and welcome hundreds of participants.

18th September 2014

“Our goal was to create a European Roadmap for Research on Music Information in order to address its main challenges, creating standards to assess research in this area, and promote collaborations with various disciplines,” explains project coordinator Michela Magas, at the Stromatolite Design Lab (UK).  The workshops organised as part of the project to allow artists, scientists and industry members to meet, eventually evolved into something more global, the Music Tech Fest.

In 2012, the first edition of this festival brought together important entities such as Soundcloud, Spotify, Shazam, EMI Music and BBC, as well as bold record labels like Ninja Tune and Warp, technology media such as WIRED, great artists and a large number of innovative startups. “In 2014 we will go global and will be in cities such as Wellington, Boston, Berlin, Paris and New York,” states Michela Magas. 13 other events are scheduled for next year.

Other than the Music Tech Fest, another equally successful result of the MIReS initiative was the creation of the European Roadmap. “The final document of the roadmap had a notable impact on the community that do research on MIR and contributed to the creation of standards for music production and for managing digital repositories,” the coordinator of MIReS states. This work also led to the development of a framework for a network of excellence in Music Information Retrieval, involving promoters and stakeholders.

INESC TEC provided different contributions for defining future directions for research on MIR. The CTM team involved in the project included Fabien Gouyon and Carlos Guedes, as well as Marcos Domingues, former researcher at CTM.

The MIReS gathered seven partners from five countries: MTG, STROMATOLITE, OFAI, INESC TEC, IRCAM, C4DM and BMAT.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and FEUP.

INESC TEC, September 2014