Session details: AdMIRe'12 workshop 6

ABSTRACTMusic information research (MIR) has been a fast growing field of research during the past decade. In traditional MIR, music-related information were extracted from the audio signal using signal processing techniques. These methods, however, cannot capture semantic information that is not encoded in the audio signal, but nonetheless essential to many consumers, e.g., the meaning of the lyrics of a song or the political motivation or background of a singer. The recent launches of Google Music, Amazon.com's Cloud Player and Apple's iCloud with iTunes' Scan and Match show the huge commercial interest behind music distribution and consumption. Given the fact that music is an omnipresent topic on the Web, techniques to mine the Web of Music are vital for music information research. In recent years, the emergence of various Web 2.0 platforms and services dedicated or related to the music and audio domain, like last.fm, YouTube, MusicBrainz, Pandora, or Echo Nest, has been providing novel and powerful, albeit noisy, sources for high level, semantic information on music artists, albums, songs, and others. The abundance of such information provided by the power of the crowd can therefore contribute to music information research and development considerably. On the other hand, the wealth of newly available, semantically meaningful information offered on Web 2.0 platforms also poses new challenges, e.g., dealing with the huge amount and the noisiness of this kind of data, various user biases, hacking, or the cold start problem. Another recent trend are innovative user interfaces to access the large amounts of music available on smart mobile devices that are always connected to the Web. Dealing with the vast amounts of music requires new interaction paradigms and intelligent services that provide, for example, personalized and context-aware music recommendations. The current emergence and confluence of these challenges make this an interesting field for researchers and industry practitioners alike. Addressing these challenges, the International Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research (AdMIRe) workshop served as a forum for theoretical and practical discussions of cutting edge research in the fields of music information extraction, retrieval, and recommendation in the Web of Music. The workshop brought together researchers and developers from the music and audio community, the multimedia community, and the Web mining community and further initiated interesting and fruitful discussions on the future of MIR. This year was AdMIRe's 4th edition, and we received a considerable number of high-quality submissions. A total of 14 submissions from 7 different countries have been reviewed by at least 4 reviewers each, and 9 papers have finally been accepted for publication and presentation at the workshop. They span a wide field, including topics such as Web-based data and microblogging mining, content-based music processing, music similarity and recommendation from hybrid sources, and new evaluation methods.