Music Information Retrieval

Also known as MIR

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Overview

Music Information Retrieval studies how computers can identify and organize music, extract musical features, and connect recordings, scores, and descriptions to support search, analysis, and creative work. Approaches range from audio fingerprints, signal-processing features, and dynamic time warping to CNNs, transformers, self-supervised representations, and audio-language models. Common tasks include transcription and beat tracking, chord and genre recognition, music similarity and version retrieval, source separation, and recommendation, evaluated on datasets such as MAESTRO and MUSDB18. The field has strong systems for many benchmark tasks, but performance can falter on noisy or unfamiliar music and underrepresented traditions; aligning model scores with human judgments and verifying fine-grained audio understanding remain open challenges.

Latest papers

CardsList

153 papers25 papers in the last four weeks, up 32% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Gangqinpu: A Multi-Genre, Multi-Task Piano Dataset with Aligned Audio, MIDI, and Musical Scores

    Oct 26, 2026Wei Zeng, Anvay Mathur, Ye WangMultimodal DatasetMusic Information Retrieval

    Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme, NUS Graduate School · School of Computing, National University of Singapore · Singapore American School

  2. JIT-MPE: Just-in-Time Multi-Pitch Estimation under Output Deadlines

    Oct 23, 2026Yoshiyuki KobayashiMusic Information RetrievalStreaming Inference

    Frieve

  3. Derivation Depth Exposes Reasoning Failures in Tool-Augmented Music Analysis

    Oct 21, 2026Rupali Rajesh, Sethuraman T, Savya Khosla +4Music UnderstandingAudio-Language Model Evaluation

    IIT Madras · UIUC · Google +2

  4. KunSet: A Corpus and Benchmark for Lyrics Alignment and Rhyme Retrieval in Kunqu Opera

    Oct 21, 2026Lejun Min, Siqi Chen, Delong Wang +10Music Information RetrievalAudio-Text Alignment

    Stanford University · Peking University · University of California San Diego +3

  5. Structural Context from Audio and Lyric Evidence for Music Structure Analysis Using the New SheetSage-MSA Dataset

    Oct 19, 2026Hongbing Li, Yaolong JuMusic Information Retrieval

    Queen Mary University of London, London, UK · Great Bay University, Dongguan, China

  6. Whistle and Wrong Lyrics: Synthetic Queries Are Not Enough for Real-World Query-by-Melody

    Oct 18, 2026Luigi RivoltaMusic Information Retrieval

    Independent Researcher

  7. MUB: An Identity-Masked Benchmark for Music Understanding in Multimodal Language Models

    Oct 16, 2026Kun Liu, Lyra TaoAudio-Language Model EvaluationMusic Understanding

  8. FLOMSS: Generative Music Source Separation by Flow Matching

    Oct 13, 2026Shuyang Cui, Zhi Zhong, Keisuke Toyama +10Music Source SeparationAudio Source Separation

    Sony Group Corporation

  9. Predicting Audio Popularity: A Comparative Study of Metadata and Acoustic Features Across Music and Sound Effects

    Oct 12, 2026Ikram El Hadi, Nihad Elbari, Kawtar Tlemçani +2Music Information Retrieval

    ENSIM, Le Mans Université, France · LIUM, Le Mans Université, France

  10. JSIR: An Audio-Aligned, Multi-Task Dataset of Jazz Standard Recordings

    Oct 11, 2026Sihun Lee, Dasaem JeongMusic Information Retrieval

    Sogang University Department of Artificial Intelligence Seoul, South Korea

  11. Explore This! Beat and Downbeat Tracking From a Learned Tatum Grid

    Oct 10, 2026Robert Kihlborg, André Holzapfel, Jan SchlüterMusic Information Retrieval

    KTH Stockholm · JKU Linz

  12. How Much Audio Is Left In An Embedding? An Inversion Audit Of Audio Encoders

    Oct 8, 2026Marios Glytsos, Brian McFeeAudio Representation LearningMusic Information Retrieval

    Music and Audio Research Laboratory, New York University, NY, USA

  13. STEMMA: Song-to-Stem Multi-Audio Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models

    Oct 8, 2026Hoyeol Sohn, Wonil Kim, Keunhyoung Kim +7Audio ReasoningMusic Understanding

    Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea · Neutune, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  14. CASM: Context-Aware Semi-Markov Post-Processor for Beat Tracking

    Oct 7, 2026Zhanhong He, Hanyu Meng, Yaolong JuMusic Information RetrievalSequence Modeling

    The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia · The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia · Great Bay University, Dongguan, China

  15. Towards AI-Generated Music Plagiarism Detection as a Version Identification Problem

    Oct 6, 2026Fotis Koutsikos, Ioannis Prokopiou, Spyridon Kantarelis +6Music Information Retrieval

    National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece · Orfium, Athens, Greece +1

  16. Geometric Representations for Transformed Pattern Matching in Music

    Oct 6, 2026David MeredithMusic Information Retrieval

    Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

  17. A Multidimensional Model for Quantifying Tonal Strength: A Continuous Framework of Analyzing Tonal Evolution Beyond Tonal-Atonal Binary Classification

    Oct 4, 2026Yuliang Li, Nan Nan, Meilian Gu +1Computational MusicologyMusic Information Retrieval

    Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China · Interdisciplinary Research Center of Frontier Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China · MOE KLINNS Lab, Faculty of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China +2

  18. Extending Music Annotation Schemas: Zero-Shot Prediction or Few-Shot Adaptation?

    Oct 2, 2026Christos Plachouras, Emmanouil Benetos, Johan PauwelsMusic Information RetrievalAudio-Language Model Evaluation

    School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK

  19. Revisiting Input Time-frequency Representations in Multi-pitch Estimation for Vocal Ensembles

    Oct 2, 2026Junyoung Koh, Hao-Wen DongMusic Information RetrievalAudio Understanding

    Yonsei University · University of Michigan

  20. LayerIt: Towards a Framework for Time-Aligned, Composable Music Visualizations

    Oct 2, 2026Fernando Azeredo, António Sá PintoMusic Information Retrieval

    Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal · INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal

  21. PEACE: Joint Embeddings of DSP Effects Code and Audio

    Oct 2, 2026David Braun, Adam FinkelsteinAudio Representation LearningMusic Information Retrieval

    Princeton University

  22. Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning

    Oct 2, 2026Drew Edwards, Akira Maezawa, Simon DixonMusic GenerationSymbolic Music Generation

    Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London · Yamaha Corporation Hamamatsu, Japan

  23. Pitch Smoothing Using Relative Interval Networks

    Sep 30, 2026Chin-Yun Yu, Chi-Jen Peng, Li Su +1Music Information Retrieval

    Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, UK · Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University, Taiwan · Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

  24. Emergent Tonal Structure in Learned Chord Embeddings and Its Relation to Tonal Tension

    Sep 29, 2026Maral Ebrahimzadeh, Gilberto Bernardes, Sebastian StoberRepresentation LearningMusic Information Retrieval

    Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Magdeburg, Germany · INESC TEC, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal

  25. Retrieving Individual Stems from Music Mixtures with Slot Embeddings

    Sep 28, 2026David Braun, Junyi Fan, Pranay Manocha +2Audio Representation LearningMulti-Vector Retrieval

    Princeton University · The Ohio State University · Symbal AI

  26. JazzSAMBA: A Synchronous and Asynchronous Multi-take Band Audio Dataset of Jazz Standards for Live Music Models

    Sep 28, 2026Phillip Long, Jacob Nguyen, Jace Hosto +9Music Information Retrieval

    University of California, San Diego · Independent Musician · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  27. Perceptually Motivated Alignment and Interpolation of Pitch-Aligned Time-Frequency Representations

    Sep 25, 2026Shahan Nercessian, Jeff Sontag, Alejandro KoretzkyMusic Information Retrieval

    Splice New York, USA

  28. Music Source Separation via Stem Discovery

    Sep 25, 2026V. Valtteri Kallinen, Eloi Moliner, Lauri Juvela +1Music Source SeparationAudio Source Separation

    Acoustics Lab, Dept. of Information and Communications Eng., Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

  29. Nearest but Not Dearest: Shared Curator-Feedback Infrastructure for Content-Only Search and Recommendation

    Sep 24, 2026Matt SandlerRecommender SystemsMusic Information Retrieval

    Feed.fm San Francisco, California, USA

  30. Pose-Aware Multimodal Automatic Tagging for Greek Traditional Music

    Sep 22, 2026Alexandros Alexiou, Charilaos Papaioannou, Alexandros PotamianosMusic Information RetrievalMultimodal Fusion

    School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece