Twenty-Five Years of MIR Research: Achievements, Practices, Evaluations, and Future Challenges

In this paper, we trace the evolution of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) over the past 25 years. While MIR gathers all kinds of research related to music informatics, a large part of it focuses on signal processing techniques for music data, fostering a close relationship with the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Commitee. In this paper, we reflect the main research achievements of MIR along the three EDICS related to music analysis, processing and generation. We then review a set of successful practices that fuel the rapid development of MIR research. One practice is the annual research benchmark, the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange, where participants compete on a set of research tasks. Another practice is the pursuit of reproducible and open research. The active engagement with industry research and products is another key factor for achieving large societal impacts and motivating younger generations of students to join the field. Last but not the least, the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion ensures MIR to be a vibrant and open community where various ideas, methodologies, and career pathways collide. We finish by providing future challenges MIR will have to face.

I. Introduction

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is the field that covers all the research topics involved in the understanding, modeling and (more recently) the processing and generation of music . While comparable research existed before (MIR drew from earlier work such as on symbolic music, speech/music discrimination, beat-tracking, or the development of MPEG-7), they were unified under the MIR umbrella in 2000 with the establishment of the first MIR symposium known today as the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference and the related ISMIR organisation . Over the years, the contribution of MIR research to the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Commitee (TC) has progressively grown through journals and conferences, notably the Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), and the Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA). While in 2000, MIR was represented within the "Audio and Electroacoustic" TC by only 8 papers in the EDIC [AUD-MUSI] (Applications to Music), it extended in 2006 to two specific EDICS [AUD-ANSY] and [AUD-CONT] , renamed [AUD-MSP] and [AUD-MIR] in 2010 in the new AASP TC. Since 2013, around 40 MIR papers are presented every year at ICASSP (with a peak of 47 in 2024) which represents a large fraction (over one third) of the total MIR papers published every year. MIR has been in the top biggest groups of papers since 2013 and represented 18.8% of the AASP papers in ICASSP 2024 . Starting in 2025, MIR will be represented by three EDICS categories: "Music analysis", "Music signal processing, production, and separation," and "Audio/symbolic-domain music generation," reflecting the field’s ongoing development. The development of MIR in the AASP community can also be found through some special issues in IEEE journals, e.g., 2010 Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) [1] and 2019 Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) [2] on music signal processing.