Douglas Eck

The need for music information retrieval with user-centered and multimodal strategies

Music is a widely enjoyed content type, existing in many multifaceted representations. With the digital information age, a lot of digitized music information has theoretically become available at the users fingertips. However, the abundance of information is too large-scaled and too diverse to annotate, oversee and present in a consistent and human manner, motivating the development of automated Music Information Retrieval (Music-IR) techniques. In this paper, we encourage to consider music content beyond a monomodal audio signal and argue that Music-IR approaches with multimodal and user-centered strategies are necessary to serve real-life usage patterns and maintain and improve accessibility of digital music data. After discussing relevant existing work in these directions, we show that the field of Music-IR faces similar challenges as neighboring fields, and thus suggest opportunities for joint collaboration and mutual inspiration.