The Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London will be present at the 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2026), held 8-12 November 2026 at NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE. The conference theme this year is Crossroads, reflecting the region's position at the intersection of East and West and foregrounding human-centric dimensions of music AI such as social impact, ethics, health and education. The event is hybrid, with both in-person and online participation. C4DM members are involved across the scientific programme, tutorials, and conference organisation.
In the Scientific Programme, the following papers are authored/co-authored by C4DM members:
- Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning (Drew Edwards, Akira Maezawa, Simon Dixon)
- Steering Dense Music Retrieval With Open-Vocabulary Concept Discovery (Julien Guinot, Alain Riou, Elio Quinton, György Fazekas)
- LiveBand: Live Accompaniment Generation in the Audio Domain (Marco Pasini, Javier Nistal, Mathias R. Bjare, Stefan Lattner, György Fazekas)
- MAJEPPA: Morphing and Assessing in a Unified Piano Performance Space (Jinwen Zhou, Huan Zhang, Weixi Zhai, Jinhua Liang, Aidan O. T. Hogg, Simon Dixon)
- A First Benchmark and Metric for Evaluating Polyphony in Symbolic Music using Voice Independence (Eleanor Row, György Fazekas)
- Diff2Mix: Controllable Music Mixing via Diffusion Models and Differentiable Audio Effects (Yisu Zong, Jinjie Shi, Joshua Reiss)
- AudioCodex: Streaming Autoencoders for Live Audio (Marco Pasini, Javier Nistal, Cyran Aouameur, Stefan Lattner, György Fazekas)
- Equivariant Music Transformer (Zixun Guo, Simon Dixon)
- Understanding Automatic Mixing: A Subtask-Oriented Analysis of Two-Stage Mixing System (Jinjie Shi, Wei Hua, Kunzhu Xie, Make Li, Yuchen Liu, Joshua Reiss)
C4DM PhD students Yinghao Ma and Weixiong Chen are co-presenting tutorial T4: Evaluating Music Foundation Models: From MIREX To Multimodal, Preference-Aware Benchmarking (with Junyan Jiang and Yizhi Li). The tutorial covers evaluation methodologies for music foundation models, from classical MIREX-style benchmarks through to multimodal and preference-aware approaches.
On the organisational side, C4DM member Christos Plachouras is serving as New to ISMIR Co-Chair for ISMIR 2026.
We look forward to seeing the music information retrieval community in Abu Dhabi and online!