Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

Abstract

Challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the 20th ISMIR conference, asks how MIR can refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity. It is written by an outsider, yet one who, as a music anthropologist, is intensely concerned with MIR and its influence. The focus is on elaborating auto-critiques that have emerged within the MIR community: social, cultural, epistemological and ethical matters to do with the diversity of the profession, of the music with which MIR engages, and of the kinds of knowledge produced. One theme is interdisciplinarity: how MIR would gain from closer dialogues with contemporary musicology, music anthropology and sociology. The article also considers how the ‘refresh’ might address MIR’s pursuit of research oriented to technological innovation, often linked to the drive for economic growth; concerns about sustainable economies, it argues, suggest the need for other values to guide future science and engineering. In this light, the article asks what computational music genre recognition or recommendation would look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise imaginative self- or group development, pursuing not a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity, or took human musical flourishing as their goals. The article closes by suggesting that the time is ripe in MIR for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen.

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