Announcements

International Conference on Music Information Retrieval 2004, 2005, and 2006

The steering committee of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) is glad to announce the schedule and sites for the following ISMIR conferences: 10–12 October 2004 in Barcelona, Spain, at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with general chair Xavier Serra, ismir2004.ismir.net/; Fall 2005 in London, UK, co-hosted by City University and Queen Mary University of London, with general co-chairs Tim Crawford and Mark Sandler, ismir2005.ismir.net/; and Fall 2006 somewhere in the Americas. (The conference's acronym, ISMIR rather than ICMIR, reflects its origin as a symposium.) Interested conference organizers can look at the ISMIR Web site (www.ismir.net/) for general information about hosting ISMIR conferences and can contact the steering committee (ismir-sc@ ircam.fr) with questions or expressions of interest.

2004 International Speech Communication Association Tutorial and Research Workshop

The 2004 International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Tutorial and Research Workshop on Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing (SAPA2004) will be held 2–3 October 2004 at Jeju Island in Korea, as a satellite to the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2004). The objective of the one-and-a-half day workshop is to provide an informal environment for the discussion of different approaches to various problems in audio and speech processing. The workshop will comprise three sessions, focusing on statistical, perceptually motivated, and hybrid methods of processing speech and audio signals. The aim of the workshop is to bring together people who work on heuristic or perceptually motivated methods of speech, music, and audio analysis, and those who work on similar problems from a statistical angle. It is hoped that the participants of the workshop will be exposed to a broader perspective, and that this will help foster new research, or interesting variants to current approaches.

Topics to be presented are intended to include the following: generalized audio analysis, speech analysis, music analysis, audio classification, speech recognition, signal separation, and multi-channel analysis. Also of interest is work that relates computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) based methods to other statistical methods, e.g., independent component analysis (ICA), and other methods that use CASA-like cues in a statistical framework for separation or recognition.

For additional details, see the workshop Web site at www.sapa 2004.org, or contact the organizers Dr. Bhiksha Raj (bhiksha@merl.com) and Dr. Paris Smaragdis (paris@ merl.com) (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, Massachussetts, USA), or Prof. Daniel Ellis (dpwe@ee.columbia.edu) (Columbia University, New York, New York, USA).

Sound and Music Computing '04

The Sound and Music Computing '04 (SMC04) international conference will be held on 20–22 October 2004 at l'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), located at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Sound and Music Computing (SMC) is supervised jointly by Associazione Italiana di Informatica Musicale (AIMI) and Association Française d'Informatique Musicale (AFIM). The first SMC edition is organized by IRCAM. It will take place during the Ircam Resonances 2004 Festival, a ten-day music technology forum combining conferences, workshops, open-doors, and concerts from Wednesday, 13 October to Friday, 22 October 2004. The preliminary Web page is at smc04.ircam.fr/.

Paper submissions are solicited in all the sound and music computing fields. A special session on "Improvisation with the Computer" is planned during the first day (20 October), for which papers are solicited as well.

Music Notation and Moving Picture Experts Group

The MusicNetwork is a working group on music notation, operating in collaboration with the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) to promote the incorporation of music notation into the MPEG protocol. This project is intended to define requirements to arrive at standardizing a music notation representation and decoder and aimed at opening a path for creating new applications and markets.

To this end an Ad Hoc Group (AHG) of MPEG on music notation requirements has been created, with precise goals and a timeline. The union of these groups includes about 400 experts from throughout the world, with most of the work performed by electronic mail. In addition, there are frequent meetings to which the most active participants...