Current Issue

AI and Musical Creativity

Guest Editors

Bob L. T. Sturm (lead), Associate professor of Computer Science, KTH, Sweden
Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd, Senior Lecturer, School of Science, RMIT University
Anna Huang, Research Scientist, Magenta, Google Brain
Hendrik Vincent Koops, Senior Data Scientist, RTL Netherlands

This special issue will focus on new research developments in the domain of artificial intelligence (AI) applied to modeling and creating music in a variety of styles, e.g., popular, folk, classical and contemporary classical. It is motivated by the 2020 AI Song Contest, in which the four guest editors adjudicated or participated among many academic teams from Europe, the UK and Australia. This event provided an exciting and unique opportunity for AI music researchers to put to the test current approaches and develop new ones, within the context of music creation. It not only revealed just how far we are from the automatic generation of hit music, but also ways in which humans and machines can work together as partners in music creation.

We are looking for mature work about the application and use of AI for music creation, e.g.,

• studies of creativity through AI based on music information
• supporting human creativity by AI
• human-centered AI for musical creativity
• music analysis and/or generation/performance/synthesis
• comparisons of AI and human-generated music 
• evaluation methodology
• ethics of AI in music creation

This special issue of TISMIR provides an opportunity to bring together state of the art research in these areas. It is important and especially timely to consolidate and build new knowledge about how we can effectively, creatively and ethically use such algorithms in creative contexts.

Submission Guidelines:

Please note in your cover letter that your paper is intended to be part of this Special Issue on AI and Musical Creativity.

Submissions should adhere to formatting guidelines of the TISMIR journal: https://transactions.ismir.net/about/submissions/

Specifically, articles must not be longer than 8,000 words in length, including referencing, citation and notes.

Please also note that if the paper extends or combines the authors' previously published research, it is expected that there is a significant novel contribution in the submission (as a rule of thumb, we would expect at least 50% of the underlying work - the ideas, concepts, methods, results, analysis and discussion - to be new).

Deadlines:

- Submission deadline: The special issue is now open for submission until February 28, 2021
- First round of reviews finished: April 30, 2021
- Second submission deadline (in case revisions are necessary): June 30, 2021

Please note that as soon as a paper has been accepted and successfully passed the production stage, it will already be published online, even if the decision process for other special issue papers is not finished yet.

We expect all accepted papers to be published before the end of 2021.

ISMIR is the world’s leading research forum on processing, searching, organizing and accessing music-related data. It is also proud to support the journal Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval. The 21st edition of the ISMIR conference, initially planned to take place in Montréal, Canda, will finally take place in a virtual format from October 11-15, 2020.

For more information please visit https://ismir.github.io/ISMIR2020/