ISMIR 2026 welcomes contributions in all the areas related to MIR and its applications, including computational music analysis, processing, generation, algorithms, and their evaluation. ISMIR is a truly interdisciplinary community, which fosters collaboration between researchers, developers, educators, librarians, students, and professionals from the disciplines involved in Music Information Retrieval, such as musicology, cognitive science, library and information science, computer science, electrical engineering, and many others. ISMIR 2026 will foster the discussion and exchange of ideas among the attendees, with special attention to new topics, emerging problems, inclusion, and diversity.

The theme of ISMIR 2026 will be “Crossroads”. This resonates with the region’s geographical position of being at the crossroads between the East and the West, and the fact that this region has been at the intersection of diverse cultures that continue to exchange and fuse. In MIR research, the exchange and fusion of technological development and human-centric dimensions such as social impact, responsibility and ethics, health and education are becoming increasingly important in the era of artificial intelligence. As such, the scientific program of ISMIR 2026 will give emphasis to human-centric dimensions in the design and evaluation of MIR techniques and systems.
 

  • MIR data fundamentals: music signal processing; symbolic music processing; metadata, tags, linked data, and semantic web; lyrics and other textual data; web mining, and natural language processing; multimodality.
  • Musical features and properties: melody and motives; harmony, chords and tonality; rhythm, beat, tempo; structure, segmentation, and form; representations of music; representation learning; timbre, instrumentation, and singing voice; musical style and genre; musical affect, emotion and mood; expression and performative aspects of music.
  • Analysis tasks: sound source separation; music transcription and annotation; optical music recognition; alignment, synchronization, and score following; music summarization; fingerprinting; automatic classification; indexing and querying; pattern matching and detection; similarity metrics.
  • Generative tasks: music and audio synthesis; transformations; interactions; real-time considerations; evaluation metrics; qualitative evaluations; artistically-inspired generative tasks.
  • Evaluation, datasets, and reproducibility: evaluation methodology; evaluation metrics; novel datasets and use cases; annotation protocols; reproducibility.
  • Responsibility and Ethics in MIR: philosophical and methodological foundations; legal and societal aspects of MIR; ethical issues related to designing and implementing MIR tools and technologies.
  • Cognitive and user-centered MIR: perception and cognition; user behavioral and physiological responses; user modeling; human-computer interaction; music interfaces and services; personalization; user-centered evaluation.
  • Computational musicology: mathematical music theory; systematic musicology; digital musicology; computational ethnomusicology; computational music theory and musicology.
  • Creativity: tools for artists, creative practice involving MIR or generative technology, human-AI co-creativity, creativity and cognition; creativity and learning; computational creativity. 
  • Applications: digital libraries and archives; music retrieval systems; music recommendation and playlist generation; music and health, well-being and therapy; music training and education; robotics; music composition, performance, and production; music videos, multimodal music systems; gaming, augmented/virtual reality; music heritage and preservation; business and marketing.
  1. February 19, 2026
    Paper Submission Portal Opens

  2. April 20, 2026
    Abstract Submission

  3. April 27, 2026
    Full Paper Submission

  4. July 10, 2026
    Notification to Authors

  5. July 31, 2026
    Camera-Ready Submission

  6. November 8, 2026
    Conference Start Date

Full Paper Review:

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers and a meta-reviewer who will oversee the process and write a meta-review with a recommendation. The Scientific Program Chairs will make the final decision based on that recommendation. 

Double Blind Review:

ISMIR follows a double-blind review process - violation may result in desk rejection. Authors should not know the names of the reviewers of their papers, and reviewers should not know the name(s) of the author(s).

Use of LLMs:

AI Usage Policy: In ISMIR 2026, we are introducing an AI Usage Policy for authors and reviewers. Please review the policy on use of AI tools (including LLMs) for additional details.

Evaluation Criteria: 

Evaluation criteria include scholarly/scientific quality, novelty of the paper, reusable insights, novelty, readability and paper organization, potential to generate discourse, and relevance of the topic to ISMIR. Papers which propose brave new ideas are valued. It is helpful to read the reviewer guidelines before paper submission.

 

New-to-ISMIR Paper Mentoring Program is designed for members new to ISMIR to share their advanced-stage work-in-progress ISMIR paper drafts with senior members of the ISMIR community as mentors to obtain focused review and constructive feedback. The program supplements the generic submission guidelines and will be run closely aligned with the paper submission deadlines. Please refer to the New-to-ISMIR Paper Mentoring Program webpage for the details.

ISMIR 2026 will be organized in a hybrid format with the aim of enabling both in-person and online participants to engage with the conference program and share their work. In-person participation is highly encouraged, and the organizing team is committed to helping presenters who wish to attend in person do so (regarding e.g., visa issues, financial support). Remote presenters will be required to attend (online) the specified session of the in-person program to which their paper is assigned.


Please contact the Scientific Program Chairs via email (ismir2026-papers@ismir.net) if you have any additional questions.