Some Interesting Computer Music Conferences

It was recently suggested that I should start a list of important conferences that should be on the radar for people interested in getting into computer music. This page is my attempt at such a list and may be updated over time.

Last modified: Dec 31, 2018 @ 10:24 am

The International Computer Music Conference – this is one of the most important conferences for mingling computer science and music, but with a very heavy emphasis from the music side. There are many opportunities to hear amazing electronic music in addition to interesting paper presentations. Authors who are coming primarily from a CS perspective and moving into music should bear in mind that the audience and reviewers are primarily going the other way – from music to CS. This means that some topics require additional explanation and/or justification than is the case in more CS-specific venues (for example, fans of functional programming should really explain what the advantages of the language category are for music). If you are new to computer music as a field, this is a great place to start integrating and becoming familiar with the state of the art.

Sound and Music Computing – similar to ICMC in terms of topics and participating communities. The two conferences were co-located in 2014.

Society for Mathematics and Computing in Music – a biennial conference on odd-numbered years focused more on mathematics in music than on general CS and music. Topics are typically music theoretic with a very high degree of formalism (in other words, proofs and theorems about musical ideas).

New Interfaces for Musical Expression – although not a conference I have personally attended yet, I keep track of what happens in the proceedings since there are a lot of interesting software and hardware interfaces for music creation that appear in this conference series.

International Society for Music Information Retrieval – focused on organization and traversal of musical data. This is a good place to see what’s going on in the areas of musical data sets and classification/analysis algorithms (like genre labeling).

Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling, and Design – associated with the International Conference on Functional Programming, this is a small, relatively new one-day event featuring artistic and musical applications of functional programming. The community supporting this series is primarily functional programmers coming from a CS perspective (specifically functional programming, of course), but people coming from other backgrounds are encouraged to participate to get a more interdisciplinary dialog going.

International Conference on Computational Creativity – I only recently found out about this one. The focus is broader than computer music and involves many topics that are relevant to artificial intelligence.

 

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