ISMIR 2025 | Call for Papers
Magdalena Fuentes
The 26th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2025) will be held in Daejeon, Korea and online from September 21st through 25th.
Website: https://ismir2025.ismir.net/
ISMIR 2025 welcomes contributions in all the areas related to Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and its applications, including computational music analysis, processing, generation, algorithms, and their evaluation. ISMIR is a truly interdisciplinary community, which fosters collaboration between researchers, developers, educators, librarians, students, and professionals from the disciplines involved in MIR, such as musicology, cognitive science, library and information science, computer science, electrical engineering, and many others. ISMIR 2025 will foster the discussion and exchange of ideas among the attendees, with special attention to new topics, emerging problems, inclusion, and diversity.
The 26th edition of the ISMIR conference carries a special theme: Harmony of Tradition & Modernity. We encourage diverse perspectives on how MIR can bridge past and present, and explore the multifaceted intersections of tradition and innovation. From the preservation and analysis of traditional music forms to the study of contemporary music trends powered by computational methods and data, we welcome submissions that advance the understanding of music as a dynamic and evolving cultural force. Join us in shaping the future of MIR by engaging with its rich historical roots and its ever-expanding horizons.
Relevant topics for ISMIR 2025 include, but are not limited to:
MIR fundamentals and methodology: music signal processing; symbolic music processing; metadata, tags, linked data, and semantic web; lyrics and other textual data; web mining, and natural language processing; multimodality.
Knowledge-driven approaches to MIR: representations of music; computational music theory and musicology; cognitive MIR; machine learning/artificial intelligence for music; computational ethnomusicology.
Musical features and properties: melody and motives; harmony, chords and tonality; rhythm, beat, tempo; structure, segmentation, and form; representations of music; timbre, instrumentation, and singing voice; musical style and genre; musical affect, emotion and mood; expression and performative aspects of music.
MIR tasks: sound source separation; music transcription and annotation; optical music recognition; alignment, synchronization, and score following; music summarization; fingerprinting; automatic classification; indexing and querying; pattern matching and detection; similarity metrics.
Generative tasks: music and audio synthesis; transformations; interactions; real-time considerations; evaluation metrics; qualitative evaluations; artistically-inspired generative tasks.
Evaluation, datasets, and reproducibility: evaluation methodology; evaluation metrics; novel datasets and use cases; annotation protocols; reproducibility.
Philosophical and ethical discussions: philosophical and methodological foundations; legal and societal aspects of MIR; ethical issues related to designing and implementing MIR tools and technologies.
Human-centered MIR: user behavior analysis and mining, user modeling; human-computer interaction; music interfaces and services; personalization; user-centered evaluation.
Computational musicology: mathematical music theory; systematic musicology; digital musicology.
Creativity: tools for artists, creative practice involving MIR or generative technology, human-ai co-creativity, creativity and cognition; creativity and learning; computational creativity; humanistic discussions.
Applications: digital libraries and archives; music retrieval systems; music recommendation and playlist generation; music and health, well-being and therapy; music training and education; music composition, performance, and production; music videos, multimodal music systems; gaming, augmented/virtual reality; music heritage and sustainability; business and marketing.
Important Dates:
Time zone : Anywhere On Earth (AOE)
March 21, 2025 - Abstract Submission Due
March 28, 2025 - Full Paper Submission Due
June 6, 2025 - Acceptance Notification
June 28, 2025 - Camera-Ready Upload Due
Selection Process:
Full Paper Review: Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers and a program committee member (meta-reviewer) who will oversee the process and write a meta-review with a recommendation. The Scientific Program Chairs will make the final decision based on that recommendation.
Double blind review: ISMIR follows a double-blind review process - violation may result in desk rejection. Authors should not know the names of the reviewers of their papers, and reviewers should not know the name(s) of the author(s).
Evaluation Criteria: Evaluation criteria include scholarly/scientific quality, novelty of the paper, reusable insights, novelty, readability and paper organization, potential to generate discourse, and relevance of the topic to ISMIR. Papers which propose brave new ideas are valued. It is helpful to read the reviewer guidelines before paper submission.
Submission Procedure:
We will be using CMT for paper submissions and the site will be available shortly. Check back here for the link at a later date!
Abstract Submission: The paper title, author names, contact details, and abstract must be submitted by the abstract submission deadline. The title and abstract, together with the selected subject area, are the primary sources for assigning papers to reviewers. So, make sure that they form a concise and complete summary of your paper with sufficient information to let someone who has not read the full paper know what it is about.
Full Paper Submission: The full paper must be submitted by the full paper submission deadline.
Supplementary Material: For the anonymous review process, in addition to the PDF file of the manuscript, authors may upload supplementary files for their submission, such as audio samples, demonstration videos, self-contained html web pages, code, etc. Submission of PDF files as supplementary material is discouraged. The supplementary materials should comply with the requirements for the double-blind review process.
Subject Area: When submitting the abstracts, authors will be required to choose from the subject areas given. The list of subject areas is the one listed above and it will be available on the submission site.
Presenting Authors: At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the conference, before the deadline given for author registration (deadline will be announced shortly). Failure to register before the deadline will result in automatic withdrawal of the paper from the conference proceedings and program.
Publication: Accepted papers will be published on the conference website and on an open access repository using a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Submission Requirements:
Paper Format: Papers must be formatted using the ISMIR 2025 templates (Overleaf, LaTeX or Word). Authors are required to submit their papers in PDF format. Submissions that manipulate the template (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) may be rejected without review. All fonts need to be embedded within the PDF.
Paper Length: Papers must conform to a 6+N format: 6 pages of scientific content (including figures and tables) and any number of additional pages that contain only references and an optional ethics statement. Overlength papers or papers that do not conform to the required format will be rejected without review. Acknowledgements can be included in the optional pages for the camera ready submission.
Ethics Statement: With the goal of encouraging more discussion of ethical considerations in the ISMIR research community, authors may now choose to include an ethics statement section in their submissions in addition to the 6 page limit for scientific content. Ethics statements are optional, though they are encouraged especially for work related to MIR technology with the potential for broad social impact, such as recommendation or generation. A good ethics statement should candidly discuss both positive and negative ethical considerations of the work, including but not limited to (1) the potential societal implications of the work, (2) the ethical manner in which the work was conducted (especially for work with user studies), and (3) the prior societal context before the work. Any cultural, economic, or broader societal risks posed by the work should be mentioned (though not necessarily resolved). Ethics statements should be placed directly in the submission PDF and do not count against the 6 page limit for scientific content. Information regarding approval from the Institutional Review Board can also be presented in this section although the names of institutions should be redacted for blind review. In most cases ethics statements would be 0-2 paragraphs, and certainly not longer than a page.
Accessibility: For this year’s submissions, we strongly encourage authors to include alt text (or alternative text) as a first step to make your manuscript more accessible. Please refer to tips and instructions on how to incorporate alt text via Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word. Also, we strongly encourage the authors to adopt a color blind friendly color palette when making plots. For Matplotlib users, the ‘tableau-colorblind10’ and ‘petroff10’ color palettes would be good options, which can be enabled by plt.style.use(’tableau-colorblind10’) and plt.style.use(’petroff10’).
Anonymity of Authors: Do not put your names under the title. Avoid using phrases such as “our previous work” when referring to earlier publications by the authors. Remove information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs). Check supplementary material for information that may reveal the authors’ identity. Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Anonymized materials may be uploaded as “Supplementary material”.
Preprints: To maintain the legitimacy for our double-blind review process, we strongly discourage authors from posting near duplicate manuscripts on public archives (technical reports, arXiv, etc.). In the same spirit, to protect our double-blind review process, authors need to make sure they do not promote their work in any way during the review process (social media, blog, mailing-list, etc.), since this may prevent preserving anonymity.
External Materials: If the paper promises to make the code, dataset, or other materials available after the acceptance, our research community relies on the research ethics of the authors to fulfill their promise.
New-to-ISMIR Paper Mentoring Program
The New-to-ISMIR paper mentoring program is designed for members new to ISMIR to share their advanced-stage work-in-progress ISMIR paper drafts with senior members of the ISMIR community as mentors to obtain focused review and constructive feedback. The program supplements the generic submission guidelines and will be run closely aligned with the paper submission deadlines. Check back here for the details at a later date!
Hybrid Conference Format
ISMIR 2025 will be organized in a hybrid format with the aim of enabling both in-person and online participants to engage with the conference program and share their work. In-person participation is highly encouraged, and the organizing team is committed to helping presenters who wish to attend in person do so (regarding e.g., visa issues, financial support). Remote presenters will be required to attend (online) the specified session of the in-person program to which their paper is assigned.
We look forward to an awesome conference in Daejeon!
Best Regards,
Li Su, Xiao Hu, Magdalena Fuentes, Tomoyasu Nakano
Scientific Program Chairs of ISMIR 2025