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. Cosmodoit: A Python Package for Adaptive, Efficient Pipelining of Feature Extraction from Performed Music

    May 5, 2026Corentin Guichaoua, Daniel Bedoya, Elaine ChewMusic Information Retrieval

    1STMS Laboratoire (UMR9912) – CNRS, IRCAM, Sorbonne Universit´e, Minist`ere de la Culture, Paris 75004, France · Department of Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, United Kingdom

  2. APEX: Large-scale Multi-task Aesthetic-Informed Popularity Prediction for AI-Generated Music

    May 5, 2026Jaavid Aktar Husain, Dorien HerremansMulti-Task LearningMusic Information Retrieval

    AMAAI Lab, Singapore University of Technology and Design

  3. GaMMA: Towards Joint Global-Temporal Music Understanding in Large Multimodal Models

    May 1, 2026Zuyao You, Zhesong Yu, Mingyu Liu +3Music UnderstandingMultimodal Pretraining

    1Fudan University · 2ByteDance

  4. An event-based sequence modeling approach to recognizing non-triad chords with oversegmentation minimization

    Apr 27, 2026Leekyung Kim, Jonghun ParkMusic Information RetrievalSequence Modeling

    Department of Industrial Engineering and Institute of Industrial Systems Innovation, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  5. An audio-to-analysis pipeline with certified transcription for information-theoretic profiling of the piano repertoire

    Apr 25, 2026Fred Jalbert-DesforgesComputational MusicologyAutomatic Music Transcription

    Independent Music Analysis Researcher Creator of CYGNUS & LYRA Montreal, Quebec

  6. Come Together: Analyzing Popular Songs Through Statistical Embeddings

    Apr 24, 2026Matthew Esmaili Mallory, Mark Glickman, Jason BrownMusic Information Retrieval

    Harvard University Department of Statistics Cambridge, MA, USA · Department of Mathematics and Statistics Dalhousie University Halifax, NS, Canada

  7. Transformer-Based Rhythm Quantization of Performance MIDI Using Beat Annotations

    Apr 24, 2026Maximilian Wachter, Sebastian Murgul, Michael HeizmannAutomatic Music TranscriptionMusic Information Retrieval

    Klangio GmbH Karlsruhe, Germany · Institute of Industrial Information Technology Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Karlsruhe, Germany

  8. Beyond Rules: Towards Basso Continuo Personal Style Identification

    Apr 23, 2026Adam Štefunko, Jan HajičMusic Information Retrieval

    Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

  9. Embedding-Based Intrusive Evaluation Metrics for Musical Source Separation Using MERT Representations

    Apr 22, 2026Paul A. Bereuter, Alois SontacchiMusic Information RetrievalAutomated Evaluation

    University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) A-8010 Graz, Austria

  10. TinyMU: A Compact Audio-Language Model for Music Understanding

    Apr 17, 2026Xiquan Li, Aurian Quelennec, Slim EssidMusic UnderstandingSmall Language Models

    LTCI, T´el´ecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  11. A Manual Bar-by-Bar Tempo Measurement Protocol for Polyphonic Chamber Music Recordings: Design, Validation, and Application to Beethoven's Piano and Cello Sonatas

    Apr 16, 2026Ignasi SoleMusic Information Retrieval

  12. BMdataset: A Musicologically Curated LilyPond Dataset

    Apr 12, 2026Matteo Spanio, Ilay Guler, Antonio RodàComputational MusicologyMusic Information Retrieval

    Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Italy · Boston University, Boston, USA

  13. Masked Contrastive Pre-Training Improves Music Audio Key Detection

    Apr 11, 2026Ori Yonay, Tracy Hammond, Tianbao YangMusic Information RetrievalAudio Representation Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University

  14. YMIR: A new Benchmark Dataset and Model for Arabic Yemeni Music Genre Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

    Apr 6, 2026Moeen AL-Makhlafi, Abdulrahman A. AlKannad, Eiad Almekhlafi +2Music Information RetrievalAudio Classification

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, China. · Department of Information Science and Technology, Northwest University, Xi’an 710127, China.

  15. Constructing Composite Features for Interpretable Music-Tagging

    Mar 30, 2026Chenhao Xue, Weitao Hu, Joyraj Chakraborty +5Music Information RetrievalAutomated Feature Engineering

    University of Oxford · Independent Researcher · University of Toronto +1

  16. HumMusQA: A Human-written Music Understanding QA Benchmark Dataset

    Mar 29, 2026Benno Weck, Pablo Puentes, Andrea Poltronieri +2Music UnderstandingAudio-Language Model Evaluation

    Universitat Pompeu Fabra · Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

  17. Can pre-trained Deep Learning models predict groove ratings?

    Mar 28, 2026Axel Marmoret, Nicolas Farrugia, Jan Alexander StupacherMusic Information RetrievalAudio Representation Learning

    IMT Atlantique, Lab-STICC, UMR CNRS 6285, Brest, France · Center for Music In the Brain, Aarhus University, Århus, Denmark

  18. Unsupervised Evaluation of Deep Audio Embeddings for Music Structure Analysis

    Mar 28, 2026Axel MarmoretAudio Representation LearningMusic Information Retrieval

    BRAIN team, MEE, IMT Atlantique, Brest, France

  19. Diachronic Modeling of Tonal Coherence on the Tonnetz Across Classical and Popular Repertoires

    Mar 27, 2026Weilun Xu, Edward Hall, Martin RohrmeierMusic Information Retrieval

    School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland · Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

  20. Probabilistic Multilabel Graphical Modelling of Motif Transformations in Symbolic Music

    Mar 27, 2026Ron Taieb, Yoel Greenberg, Barak SoberMusic Information Retrieval

    Department of Statistics and Data Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel · Department of Musicology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

  21. Variable-Length Audio Fingerprinting

    Mar 25, 2026Hongjie Chen, Hanyu Meng, Huimin Zeng +3Music Information Retrieval

    Dolby Laboratories, Atlanta, USA · The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA +2

  22. Music Genre Classification: A Comparative Analysis of Classical Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approaches

    Mar 16, 2026Sachin Prajuli, Abhishek Karna, OmPrakash DhaklAudio ClassificationMusic Information Retrieval

    Computer Science and Engineering, University of texas at Arlington, Arlington, USA · Electronics and Computer Engineering, Tribhuvan University, IOE, kathmandu · Electronics and Computer Engineering, Tribhuvan University, IOE, Dharan

  23. Perpetual Dialogues: A Computational Analysis of Voice-Guitar Interaction in Carlos Paredes's Discography

    Mar 13, 2026Gilberto Bernardes, Nádia Moura, António Sá PintoComputational MusicologyMusic Information Retrieval

    INESC TEC, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto · CEIS20, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra

  24. TimberAgent: Gram-Guided Retrieval for Executable Music Effect Control

    Mar 10, 2026Shihao He, Yihan Xia, Fang Liu +2Music Information RetrievalAudio Representation Learning

    College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China

  25. LoopLens: Supporting Search as Creation in Loop-Based Music Composition

    Mar 9, 2026Sheng Long, Atsuya Kobayashi, Kei TatenoComputational CreativityMusic Information Retrieval

    Northwestern University Evanston, USA · Sony Group Corporation Tokyo, Japan

  26. EDMFormer: Genre-Specific Self-Supervised Learning for Music Structure Segmentation

    Mar 8, 2026Sahal Sajeer, Krish Patel, Oscar Chung +1Music Information Retrieval

    University of Waterloo

  27. LabelBuddy: An Open Source Music and Audio Language Annotation Tagging Tool Using AI Assistance

    Mar 4, 2026Ioannis Prokopiou, Ioannis Sina, Agisilaos Kounelis +2Human-in-the-Loop AnnotationMusic Information Retrieval

    Athens University of Economics and Business · Orfium · University of Patras +1

  28. Voices of Civilizations: A Multilingual QA Benchmark for Global Music Understanding

    Feb 28, 2026Shangda Wu, Ziya Zhou, Yongyi Zang +4Music UnderstandingAudio-Language Model Evaluation

    Independent Researcher · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

  29. A Knowledge-Driven Approach to Music Segmentation, Music Source Separation and Cinematic Audio Source Separation

    Feb 25, 2026Chun-wei Ho, Sabato Marco Siniscalchi, Kai Li +1Audio Source SeparationMusic Source Separation

    Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · University of Palermo, Italy · Dolby Laboratories, China

  30. Enhancing Automatic Chord Recognition via Pseudo-Labeling and Knowledge Distillation

    Feb 23, 2026Nghia Phan, Rong Jin, Gang Liu +1Pseudo-LabelingMusic Information Retrieval

    California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA · Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA · Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, China