ISMIR papers

ISMIR, The International Society for Music Information Retrieval, hosts a fantastic collection of of serious research papers on music and information science in the online proceedings of ISMIR’s annual conferences. I recently came across a keynote address by Nicholas Cook, given at the 2005 ISMIR conference, on the relationship between the fields of musicology and information science. Cook’s observations point toward the potential impact of information science on a wide range of research in the arts–not just music. The paper also suggests some tantalizing implications for how the arts might be taught, studied, and practiced by future generations.

The following observation is telling–although it is far from suggesting a true intersection of these two fields, or the “computational musicology” that Cook goes on to describe in his talk (which I think is exactly his point in including it):

“It simply doesn’t make sense to teach music without technology nowadays, so that virtually everyone who teaches music either has mastered the technology or feels guilty that they haven’t.”