The Discipline formerly known as MIR

Comunicació presentada a l'ISMIR 2009 celebrat del 26 al 30 d'octubre de 2009 a Kobe, Japó.Music Information Retrieval is a young multidisciplinary endeavour [4]. Even though its origins can be traced back to the 1960’s [14], we all probably agree on the capital influence that the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, started in 2000 as symposium, has exerted on the sense of belongingness to a research community. Our exploration is not a science-fiction essay. We do not try to imagine how music will be conceptualized, experienced and mediated by our yet-to-come research, technological achievements and music gizmos. Alternatively, we reflect on how the discipline should evolve to become consolidated as such, in order it may get an effective future instead of becoming, after a promising start, just a “would-be” discipline. Our vision addresses different aspects: the discipline’s object of study, the employed methodologies, social and cultural impacts (which are out of this long abstract because of space restrictions), and we finish with some (maybe) disturbing issues that could be taken as partial and biased guidelines for future research