Other exploitation areas: Challenges
From MIReS
- Produce descriptive content analysis tools based on concepts used by musicologists. Current MIR tools do not fit many of the needs of musicologists, partly due to their limited scope, and partly due to their limited accuracy. To fill the acknowledged gap between the relatively low-level concepts used in MIR and the concepts of higher levels of abstraction central to music theory and musicology, will call for, on the one hand, the development of better algorithms for estimating high level concepts from the signal, and on the other hand, the proper handling of errors and confidence in such estimation.
- Overcome barriers to uptake of technology in music pedagogy. Generic tutoring applications do not engage the user, because they ignore the essential fact that users have widely varying musical tastes and interests, and that the drawing power of music is related to this personal experience. User modelling or personalisation of MIR systems is an open challenge not just for tutoring but for all MIR applications. Another issue is that MIR technology is currently not mature or efficient enough for many educational applications, such as those involving real-time processing of multi-instrument polyphonic music. Further research is required in topics such as polyphonic transcription, instrument identification and source separation, and in the integration of these techniques, in order to develop more elaborate music education tools than currently exist.
- Provide diagnosis, analysis and assessment of music performance at any level of expertise. A further barrier to uptake is that current music education tools have shallow models of music making (e.g. focusing only on playing the correct notes), and fail to give meaningful feedback to learners or assist in the development of real musical skills. More advanced tools will need to aid learners in areas such as phrasing, expressive timing, dynamics, articulation and tone.
- Develop visualisation tools for music appreciation. The listening experience can be enhanced via visualisations, but it is a challenge to provide meaningful visualisations, for example those which elucidate structure, expression and harmony, which inform and stimulate the listener to engage with the music.
- Facilitate seamless access to distributed music data. In order to satisfy information needs and promote the discovery of hidden content in digital music libraries, it is necessary to provide better integration of distributed data (content and meta-data, regardless of location and format) through the use of standards facilitating interoperability, unified portals for data access, and better inter-connections between institutional meta-data repositories, public and private archive collections, and other content. Open source tools for indexing, linking and aggregation of data will be particularly important in achieving this goal.
- Expand the scope of MIR applications in eHealth. Some preliminary work has demonstrated the value of MIR technologies in eHealth, for example to assist health professionals in selecting appropriate music for therapy. However, the full use of MIR in medicine still needs to be deeply explored, and its scope expanded within and beyond music therapy.
