A Multicultural approach in music information research

Our information technologies do not respond to the world's/nmulticultural reality; in fact, we are imposing the paradigms/nof our market-driven western culture also on IT, thus facilitating/nthe access of a small part of the world’s information/nto a small part of the world's population. The current IT research/nefforts may even make it worse, and future IT will/naccentuate this information bias. Most IT research is being/ncarried out with a western centered approach and as a result,/nmost of our data models, cognition models, user models,/ninteraction models, ontologies, etc., are culturally biased./nThis fact is quite evident in music information research,/nsince, despite the world's richness in terms of musical/nculture, most research is centered on CDs and metadata/nof western commercial music. This is the motivation behind/na large and ambitious project funded by the European Research/nCouncil entitled "CompMusic: Computational Models/nfor the discovery of the world's music." In this paper we/npresent the ideas supporting this project, the challenges that/nwe want to work on, and the proposed approaches to tackle/nthese challenges.The CompMusic project has received funding from the/nEuropean Research Council under the European Union’s/nSeventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant/nagreement 267583 and will run for five years starting on/nJuly 2011