ISMIR was fun this year. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the papers, there were many solid experiments. I added a lot of them to my to-read list. I enjoyed hanging out with the ISMIR crowd, people I only get to see a few times a year or less. While I got a lot out of the conference, I regret not expanding my social circle more and not showing off my majorminer search demo more. I did, however, get to spend some quality time with my dad, my sister, and Joanne and I probably spent more time in West Philly than ever before.
There was an interesting panel on Commercial Music Discovery and Recommendation, which I found a little bit discouraging. The message seemed to be that academic research and corporate development are different things and shouldn’t be confused. Elias said something to the effect that given the choice between 10x more data and an algorithm that was a few percent better, he’d take the data. Brian said that companies do what they do pretty well and academics should focus on doing things that companies can’t. Anthony didn’t foresee developments in MIR affecting him very much, predicting instead that user interface was the area that could improve the online music experience the most.
For more thorough coverage of the conference, take a look at some of the other ISMIR attendes’ blogs. Google blog search pointed me to a number of posts (in pagerank order): Paul Lamere (one of many), Elias Pampalk, Michael Good, Justin Donaldson, Jeremy ?, Kris West, Luke Barrington, Matthias Mauch, and Karin Dressler (in German).