Music Technology Seminar (MUMT621)

Music Information Acquisition, Preservation, and Retrieval


Outline for Winter 2026

ISMIR Submission deadlines: Abstract: 2026-04-20 (topics), Full paper: 2026-04-27

01/06  
01/13

 

01/20

Slide or HTML presentation I (10 min)

  • Wenye Ma: Databases for Musical Instrument Recognition
  • Pouya Mohseni: Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae
  • Arden Butterfield: MusicNet
01/27
  • Classifiers (genre, instrument, mood, performer, composer, rhythm, beat tracking, etc.)

Slide or HTML presentation I

  • Daniel Ha: IMSLP/Petrucci Library database
  • Zih-Syuan Lin: Wagner Ring Dataset

 

 

02/03

Slide presentation II (15 min)

  • Pouya Mohseni: ABC Notation
  • Zih-Syuan Lin: MEI
  • Wenye Ma: MIDI
02/10

Slide presentation II (15 min) 

  • Daniel Ha: MP3
  • Arden Butterfield: MusicXML  
02/17

Slide-based presentation III (15 min)

  • Zih-Syuan: Dynamic Programming and Connectionist Temporal Classification
  • Arden: Feature selection
  • Pouya: Transformers
02/24

 

03/03
  • Study Week: No class

 

03/10

Slide-based presentation IV (15 min)

03/17

 

03/24

Evaluation of MIR: MIREX

Slide-based presentation V (15 min)

Submit a draft of the final project proposal (1–2 pages) plus a partial bibliography

03/31

 

04/07

Final project presentations (15 min)

Submit the final project proposal (1–2 pages) with a full bibliography

Assignments

The last slide of every presentation should include a: “AI / LLM Use Statement”

Assignment #1 (Due 01/20) 4%


Assignment #2 (Due 02/03) 6% Slide-based presentation II (15 min)
  • Slide-based presentation of audio file formats: AIFF, WAV/WMA, Opus (Ogg Vorbis), Lossless formats (FLAC), etc.; MPEG formats: MPEG1 (MP3), MPEG4 (AAC), MPEG7, & MPEG21; symbolic file formats: MEI, MusicXML, MIDI, etc., or audio compression techniques. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Annotated bibliography (short summary and evaluation) as a PDF file (use links, if avialable) (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 16th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #3 (Due 2/17) 10% Slide-based presentation III (15 min)
  • Slide-based presentation of review of topics related to classifiers, e.g.: Feature extraction (audio or symbolic), Feature selection (with Genetic Algorithms) Neural Networks (shallow, deep, CNN, RNN, LSTM, Transformers, etc.), Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees (ID3 & C4.5), Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Gaussian Mixture Models, Hidden Markov Models, AdaBoost, and Dynamic Programming; include music information retrieval applications. Submit the slids as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages, single spaced, single or double columns, 1" margins) plus an annotated bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 16th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #4 (Due 03/10) 10% Slide-based presentation IV (15 min)
  • Slide-based presentation on topics of transcription, recognition, annotation, and classification. It may include general review of transcription systems (monophonic, polyphonic, separation), Beat-box transcription, singing transcription, beat/tempo tracking using audio, beat/tempo tracking using MIDI, diarization, Goto’ works, ealtme pitch tracking, piano music transcription, timbre / instrument recognition, genre classification, structural analy’sis, performer identification, music emotion recognition, review of a component of jMIR, etc. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages) with an extensive bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 16th edition), which should include practically all significant papers on the subject. You do not need to annotated them but should reference each one of them in the summary paper.

Assignment #5 (Due 03/24) 10% Slide-based presentation V (15 min)
  • Slide-based presentation on review of topics related to similarity (melody, harmony, timbre, genre, etc.), query systems, recommendation / playlist systems, historical overviews in MIR, rcomputational musicology / ethnomusicology, or exploratory research on topics related to your final project. Submit the slides as a PDF file.
  • Written summary (2–3 pages) plus an extensive bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References: 16th edition) of the presentation topic.

Assignment #6 (Due 03/24) 5%

  • A draft of the final project proposal (1–2 pages), including a tentative title, subgoals, plus a partial bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 16th edition).

Assignment #7 (Due 04/07) 5%

  • Final project presentation describing what you intend to do (5–8 min). Submit the slids as a PDF file.
  • Final project proposal (1–2 pages) with the title and a full bibliography (Chicago style, Documentation II: Author-Date References, 16th edition).

Final project (Due 05/03) 40%
  • Software project with description (2–3 pages) (Repository on Github) (ISMIR style)

or

Improving writing skills for McGill graduate students: Graphos

Reading list

Participants

  • Arden Butterfield
  • Daniel Ha
  • Zih-Syuan Lin
  • Wenye Ma
  • Pouya Mohseni
Created: 2004-01-02 Modified: Ichiro Fujinaga <
McGill Crest