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 20 th 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.

Diversity by Design in Music Recommender Systems

“…In conclusion, we share the call for an interdisciplinary effort made by Born (2020), a necessary step to escape from the technological solutionism which has partly driven the Music RS research roadmap until now, a road which however may be full of traps (Selbst et al, 2019;Seaver, 2019).…”

“…Diversifying MIR is a goal to be accomplished by understanding the multidimensionality inherent in both music and human nature. Aspects such as the diversity of the teams engaged in the design and development of MIR systems, the diversity of musical works and their creators, how to diversify tools to help MIR practitioners address cultural differences, and who and how is benefiting from the diversification strategies, and who is not, are part of the challenges described by Born (2020). Those challenges are similarly identified in the broader field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the parent of concepts such as 'Music Intelligence' and 'AI Music' (Liebman and Stone, 2020), a field in which we are already witnessing a diversity crisis, for instance with regards to the workforce involved in the design of AI systems (West et al, 2019), or the academic community participating in AI conferences (Freire et al, 2021).…”

What is a podcast? Considering innovations in podcasting through the six-tensions framework

“…Recommendation systems attempt to simplify this process, expressing the ‘ personalisation and automation ’ tension in another way, through automatic personalisation. The extent to which recommendation systems ‘succeed’ in any sense has been challenged recently (Born, 2020; Born et al, 2021), but interactivity is important beyond the initial decision of what to listen to, and introduces us to another pair of concepts in tension with one another : immersion and interactivity . If immersion is a goal, interactivity can either be seen as a way to achieve it or as a hindrance (Ryan, 1999).…”

Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthology

“…Coming to the North, our ethnographies reveal quite different comparative configurations. In Montreal, the UK and Europe, the academic digital art music and music technology scenes we researched had a unified (thirdplane) social profile, predominantly male and white, their whiteness 'unmarked' (Dyer 1997;Frankenberg 1993) -a profile reproducing those of both art music composition and engineering as professions Born 2020). If a (third-plane) politics of gender was emerging, it was at an early stage.…”