Editors’ Notes

The special issue of Computer Music Journal you are now reading provides an overview of the scientific program of the Sixth Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2009), a premier forum in Europe for promoting international exchanges in this field. The sixth edition was organized in Porto, Portugal, in July 2009.

Research in sound and music computing (SMC) approaches the whole sound and music communication chain from a multidisciplinary point of view. By combining scientific, technological, and artistic methodologies, it aims at understanding, modeling, and generating sound and music using computational approaches. The sound and music communication chain covers all aspects of the relationship between sonic energy and meaningful information, both from sound to sense—as in musical content extraction or perception—and from sense to sound—as in music composition or sound synthesis (http://smcnetwork.org/roadmap/definition).

After six years of existence, and under the steering of five European associations (Association Française d’Informatique Musicale, Associazione Italiana di Informatica Musicale, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik, Hellenic Association of Music Informatics, and Sociedad[e] Ibérica de Tecnologia Musical), the SMC Conference is reaching maturity, and its program covers a large number of topics of relevance to SMC research and practice. The sixth edition of the conference consisted of a week of music and science, featuring world-class speakers, oral and poster presentations of the latest SMC research, a summer school on Interactions with Environmental Sounds (http://smcnetwork.org/summerschool/porto2009), tutorials, “inspirational” sessions, and an exciting music program, specially compiled by four invited music curators.

A particularity of the SMC Conference series is to offer a mixed program of music, science, and technology—of practice, theory, and experimentation. Moreover, an important effort is dedicated in each conference edition to foster interactions between the diverse sides of the SMC community. It seems therefore relevant to start this special issue by an invited original essay on music programming for conferences, written by the conference music program co-chairs, Carlos Guedes and Pedro Rebelo. The article, “Reflections on Music Programming for Conferences: The Case of SMC 2009,” provides inspiring reflections on the particularities and challenges surrounding setting up a music program for conferences with eclectic audiences brought together by their interest in music itself.

Next, this special issue includes five research papers selected from the whole content of the conference (regardless of the presentation format: papers or posters). In addition to focusing on conference contributions with outstanding scientific value, we designed this selection to exemplify the diversity of active research in the SMC field. These papers have been substantially extended from their original conference versions (available online in the conference book of proceedings: http://smc2009.smcnetwork.org/proceedings), and have gone through an extra reviewing process.

The increasing availability of music data in audio format (e.g., on the Internet) has revolutionized our notion of music consumption. We do not discover music today the way we did only a few years ago. This societal fact is mirrored in the research agenda of a growing part of the SMC research community: the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community, where different long-tradition disciplines meet to empower these changes. A fundamental issue to MIR and to automatic music recommendation is the notion of music similarity. The article “Effects of Album and Artist Filters in Audio Similarity Computed for Very Large Music Databases,” by Arthur Flexer and Dominik Schnitzer, provides for the first time in the MIR literature detailed information regarding the relevance of artist and album filters on music similarity computed from audio signals when dealing with data sets of industrial scale.

The ubiquity of music over communication networks, and the introduction of individual users as fundamental pieces in content production, are also profoundly changing the ways we interact with sound and music today and how we expect to do so tomorrow. Participating in music sessions over networks seems only a few steps away. Juan-Pablo Cáceres and Chris Chafe, with their article “JackTrip/SoundWIRE Meets Server Farm,” report on recent developments of their state-of-the-art system for network performance. This system was used for the successful multi...