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Times are given in local conference time (JST).

The registration desk opens at 9:00 a.m. each day.

Program Overview:
Tuesday, 26 May 2026: Workshops & Opening
Wednesday, 27 May 2026: Conference Day 1
Thursday, 28 May 2026: Conference Day 2
Friday, 29 May 2026: Unconference & Community Meeting

Tuesday, 26 May 2026: Workshops & Opening

  • 10:00am - 1:00pm
    Parallel Sessions
    Beyond Notation: Encoding Black Creative Lineages and DAW-Based Composition Practices Parallel

    Tika Simone

    Iverna Island, Canada
    Music Alignment Uncovered: Representations, Algorithms and Hands-On Tools Parallel

    Carlos Cancino-Chacón1, Jiyun Park2, Silvan Peter1, Yigitcan Özer3, Suhit Chiruthapudi1

    1: Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
    2: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
    3: National Institute of Informatics, Japan
    Music encoding with mei-friend Parallel

    Anna Plaksin1, David M. Weigl2, Werner Goebl2

    1: KreativInstitut.OWL, Paderborn University, Germany
    2: Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil (IWK) mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
  • 1:00pm - 2:00pm Break
  • 2:00pm - 5:00pm
    Parallel Sessions
    Approaches to Musical Performance Research: Techniques, Formats, Software Parallel

    Frithjof Bömcke-Vollmer2, Silvan Peter1, Patricia Hu1, Yucong Jiang3, Carlos Cancino-Chacón1, Werner Goebl4, Lars Engeln2, Andreas Münzmay2, Johannes Hentschel5, David M. Weigl4, Axel Berndt2

    1: Johannes Kepler University, Austria
    2: Paderborn University / Detmold University of Music: Musicology Seminar Detmold–Paderborn
    3: University of Richmond, USA
    4: University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
    5: Bruckner University, Austria
    Fingering Encoding and Performance Experience for Robo-Sax Parallel

    Masatoshi Hamanaka1, Gou Koutaki2

    1: RIKEN, Japan
    2: Kumamoto University, Japan
    Interactive music encoding with Verovio Parallel

    Laurent Pugin, Andrew Hankinson

    RISM Digital Center, Switzerland
    Minimal Publishing of Multimodal Sources: Integrating MEI, TEI, and More Parallel

    Torsten Roeder, Fabian C. Moss

    Universität Würzburg, Germany
  • 5:00pm - 5:30pm Break
  • 5:30pm - 7:00pm Welcome and Opening Keynote: Akira Maezawa

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    Encoding Music Performance for Applications in Performance Analysis and Synthesis

    Akira Maezawa

    Director of MINA Lab, Yamaha Corporation

    Music performance is inherently multimodal. This talk focuses on applications of multimodality in music and on integrating these modalities. I will argue that a key opportunity in music performance encoding lies in aligning and fusing heterogeneous data rather than in representing each modality in isolation. I will discuss experiences in designing systems for music performance analysis and interaction that utilized multiple modalities, including system design and encoding choices. I hope this talk will help further the conversation about modular and multimodal frameworks for encoding music performance.

    Speaker Bio:

    Akira is a researcher in music informatics, passionate about delivering the rewarding experience of music-making to more people on this planet through technology. He leads the music informatics R&D team, "MINALab," at Yamaha and has developed music technologies and systems used in mobile apps, electronic keyboard instruments, concerts, and exhibits. He has received numerous awards and honorary mentions (10+), including the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Information Processing Society of Japan’s Research and Engineering Award, and many others.

  • 7:00pm - 7:10pm Sponsor Talks

    Location: 1st Forum (B1)

    Piano Teachers' National Association of Japan (PTNA)

    Seikoh Fukuda

    PTNA PRIM
    Special Interest Group on Music and Computer (SIGMUS), IPSJ

    Tomohiko Nakamura

    SIGMUS

Wednesday, 27 May 2026: Conference Day 1

  • 9:30am - 10:45am Communities in music making, editing and pedagogy

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    From Encoding to Empathy: Virtual Choirs as Data for Digital Musicology Long

    Ingrida Alondere

    Vilnius city municipality choir Jauna Muzika, Lithuania
    Towards Crowd-Encoding and Validation of Music Scores: Contexts and Use-Cases Short

    David M. Weigl1, Chanda VanderHart2, Werner Goebl1

    1: mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
    2: mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria / University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria
    Strategic Coalition Building to Expand MEI Pedagogy: Citizen Science, Participation, and Boundary-Transgressing Encoding Practices Short

    Jessica Grimmer1, Joshua Neumann2, Tim Duguid3

    1: University of Maryland, United States of America
    2: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Germany
    3: University of Glasgow, Scotland
    Encoding the Musical Legacy of Jacob J. Sawyer (1856-1885): Establishing the First MEI Corpus of a 19th-Century African-American Composer Short

    Nico Schüler

    Texas State University, United States of America
  • 10:45am - 11:30am Rapid poster presentations

    Location: First Forum (B1)

  • 11:30am - 12:00pm ☕ Coffee break
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm Posters and Showcases
    Showcases
    The Interactive Drunken Sailor: Exploring Interactive Digital Music Editions

    Tobias Bachmann, Anna Plaksin, Adrian Nachtwey

    Paderborn University
    Bridging Algorithmic Power and Visual Interactivity: A Hybrid Python–MEI Workflow Using CAMAT and mei-friend

    Egor Polyakov, Martin Pfleiderer, Pia Steuck

    University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar
    MusicDiffVision: A Tool for Comparing and Visualising Relations between Music Encodings

    Tim Eipert, Adrian Nachtwey

    University of Würzburg, Paderborn University
    Posters
    Encoding Expressive Music Recordings into Symbolic Form for the Analysis and Identification of Performance Style

    Rafael Ramirez

    UPF Barcelona
    Dilemmadata: On the Interoperability of Heterogeneous Roman Numeral Datasets

    Johannes Hentschel, Emmanouil Karystinaios, Gerhard Widmer, Markus Neuwirth

    ABU & JKU, Linz
    Understanding Piano Sight-Reading Exercises: A Score-based Encoder-Decoder LSTM Framework

    Bofan Ma, Hongshuo Fan, David De Roure, Emily Howard, Wiebke Thormählen

    RNCM Manchester, Texas A&M University, University of Oxford
    Visualizing the Dynamics of Activities and Accompaniment in Music Therapy Sessions ― An Attempt Using ELAN Annotation and ANNM/ANB Metrics

    Risa Kobayashi, Nami Iino, Masaki Matsubara

    University of Tsukuba, Seitoku University, RIKEN
    Software-based Performance Analysis for Musical Theatre

    Anne Schmid, Torsten Roeder

    University of Würzburg
    Revisiting Music Encoding for Music-to-Text Large Language Models: What Is Encoded and What Is “Heard”

    Kun Fang, Ziyu Wang, Ichiro Fujinaga

    McGill University, NYU, MbZUAI
    Video‑to‑Score Alignment in MEI: A Practical Approach

    Silke Reich

    Goethe University Frankfurt
    A Comprehensive Visualization for Music Style Transfer

    Xinhui Liu, Zeming Li

    Macau
    Rendering and Converting S-GABC with Verovio

    David Rizo, Laurent Pugin, Cristina Alís-Raurich, Martha Thomae Elías, Eliseo Fuentes-Martínez, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza

    University of Alicante, RISM Digital, CESEM Lisbon
    Music knowledge representation and semi-automated discovery of musical structure

    Nicholas Harley, Geraint Wiggins

    Brussels
    (Auto) Aligning the Stars via Audio Data Integration in MEI

    Clemens von Cramon, Joshua Neumann

    Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz
    Historical Changes in Performance Style Based on Analyses of Speed Deviations

    Mai Takahashi, Michikazu Kobayashi, Ikki Ohmukai

    Kyoto University, Kochi University, University of Tokyo
    MEIGarage: Fostering Data Quality for Musicological Research

    Anne Ferger, Leonie Hofstetter, Aleksander Marcic

    Paderborn University
    Expert Fingering Variation in Classical Guitar Etudes: Creation of Dataset for Comparative Analysis

    Nami Iino, Akinaru Iino

    University of Tsukuba, RIKEN, Niigata
    Comparative Analysis of Musical and Poetic Syntax in the Late Italian Madrigal: The Tasso in Music Project

    Emiliano Ricciardi, Craig Sapp

    Amherst College, Stanford University
    A metrical structure estimation for irregular meters: a pilot model based on human perception

    Kosuke Suzuki, Toshie Matsui

    Toyohashi University of Technology
    Just Intonation in Tonal Thought: Towards a Corpus Study

    Jan-Martin Gebert

    Columbia University
  • 1:30pm - 2:30pm Lunch break

    (See Local Information for a map and list of nearby restaurants)

  • 2:30pm - 4:00pm Corpora and Complications

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    From Manuscript to MEI: Challenges and Solutions in Encoding Early 20th-Century Lithuanian Sacred Music Long

    dr. Imantas Jonas Šimkus

    Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
    Mixed Notation vs. Transitional Notation: Creating a small encoded corpus of John Dowland songs Long

    Anna Plaksin, William Lepp, Annabelle Mueller, Nils Jesse Schäfer, Sophie Stremel

    Paderborn University, Germany
    The Extending MEI for Indigenous Sound Archives: Encoding the 1967 Truku Field Recordings Short

    Liang Lee

    National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
    Encoding the Modernization of Tradition: Alignment Strategies for Gagaku Score and Staff Notation Short

    Shintaro Seki

    RIKEN, Japan
  • 4:00pm - 4:30pm ☕ Coffee break
  • 4:30pm - 6:00pm Tools

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    Diplomatic rendering with Thulemeier - Digital Fac-similes for MEI Long

    Johannes Kepper1, Richard Sänger2

    1: Beethovens Werkstatt, Paderborn University, Germany
    2: Beethovens Werkstatt, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Germany
    Handling repetition structures in music encodings: Realising expansions with Verovio Short

    Werner Goebl1, David M. Weigl1, Iacopo Cividini2, Laurent Pugin3

    1: University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
    2: Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, Austria
    3: RISM Digital Center, Switzerland
    Revisiting the (Deep Optical) Measure Detector Long

    Alexander Nguyen1,2, Nikolaos Beer2

    1: Institute for Music Informatics and Musicology, Karlsruhe University of Music, Germany
    2: Max-Reger-Institute, Karlsruhe, Germany
    The Benchmark for Encoding Assessment in Music (BEAM): Evaluating LLM Performance in Symbolic Music Parsing Short

    Liam Pond1,2, Tace McNamara3, Ichiro Fujinaga1,2

    1: McGill University
    2: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology
    3: Monash University
  • 7:00pm - 10:00pm Dinner

Thursday, 28 May 2026: Conference Day 2

  • 9:30am - 11:30am Notations and traditions

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    On Every Note a Griff: Looking for a Useful Representation of Basso Continuo Performance Style Long

    Adam Štefunko1, Carlos Eduardo Cancino-Chacón2, Jan Hajič jr.1

    1: Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Czech Republic (Czechia)
    2: Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
    Beyond OHCO: Introducing the MEI-notredame Customisation Long

    Joshua Stutter

    Newcastle University, United Kingdom
    Encoding Guqin Jianzipu: A Gesture-Based MEI Module for a Logographic Notation Long

    Yifan Huang, Eto Sun, Ichiro Fujinaga

    McGill University, Canada
    Microtonal support in Verovio Long

    Karim Ratib

    Not affiliated, Canada
  • 11:30am - 12:00pm ☕ Coffee break
  • 12:00pm - 1:30pm Managing and cataloguing music data

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    Understanding artefacts of Renaissance polyphony: towards an ontology Long

    Erik Bergwall1, Marnix van Berchum2

    1: Uppsala University, Sweden
    2: Utrecht University, The Netherlands
    Bibliographic Readiness of Digital Music Editions Short

    Daniel Jettka, Hizkiel Alemayehu, Daniel Röwenstrunk, Kristin Herold

    Universität Paderborn, Germany
    GitHub Actions in Action: Workflow Automation for Digital Music Research and Editions Short

    Julia Maria Jaklin1, Henning Burghoff2, David M. Weigl3

    1: TU Wien
    2: University of Vienna
    3: mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
    Plaine and Easie(r) Long

    Andrew Hankinson, Rodolfo Zitellini, Laurent Pugin

    RISM Digital Center, Switzerland
  • 1:30pm - 2:30pm Lunch break

    (See Local Information for a map and list of nearby restaurants)

  • 2:30pm - 4:00pm Annotation

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    A Context-Aware Piano Performance Encoding Framework for Sustain Pedaling Short

    Hanwen Zhang1, Lele Liu2, Ichiro Fujinaga1

    1: McGill University, Canada
    2: University of Würzburg
    Precise and Simple Audio-to-Score Alignment Short

    Silvan Peter, Patricia Hu, Gerhard Widmer

    Johannes Kepler University, Austria
    Encoding Musical Space in Inviso Short

    Anıl Çamcı, Zeynep Özcan

    University of Michigan
    A Flexible Encoding Model for Non-Unique Note Alignments Short

    Suhit Chiruthapudi1, Adam Štefunko2, Silvan Peter1, Patricia Hu1, Jan Hajič jr.2, Carlos Eduardo Cancino-Chacón1

    1: Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
    2: Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
    Score-Agnostic Structure Analysis in Large-Scale Performance Datasets Short

    Patricia Hu, Silvan Peter, Gerhard Widmer

    Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria, Austria
  • 4:00pm - 4:30pm ☕ Coffee break
  • 4:30pm - 6:00pm Closing Keynote: Christina Crowder

    Location: First Forum (B1)

    Start a Band to Build an Archive: The Power of Interdisciplinary Teams and Community Engagement

    Christina Crowder, Clara Byom

    Klezmer Institute, United States of America

    Georgina Born’s keynote address to the 20th ISMIR conference in 2020 suggested that, “the time is ripe in MIR for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen.” In 2022, my Klezmer Institute colleagues and I wrote that, “a healthy relationship with MIR would involve a more cyclical engagement between the MIR community and music-makers in the communities that are their subject of study and analysis.” We would like to take this opportunity to expand on what this more cyclical engagement might look like in a practical sense, and to make the case for supporting communities of musical practice within diaspora and post-vernacular cultural groups. This framing focuses on highly-skilled “scholar practitioners” as carriers of embodied musical knowledge and deep domain expertise, and associated communities of practice as a potential talent pool for developing novel research projects and collaborative community-facing tools that make use of the maturing MEI and other MIR ecosystems.

    Inviting conversation with a diverse set of stakeholders across the project lifecycle has the potential to ensure that interdisciplinary projects point toward a future we want rather than what appears technologically possible in the present. User experience research within the Klezmer Archive Project community revealed that, while we could use many existing tools, there was a desire to capture more of the vitality of oral tradition: the transformation and transmission of tunes through generations. For musicians, tunes have a kind of agency and take on lives of their own as they move through musical communities. The ability for MIR projects like the Klezmer Archive Project to trace these networks into digital spaces holds the tantalizing potential to heighten our sense of how tunes live in context and connect communities of musicians across geography and generations. As community-focused MIR projects demonstrate, there is an audience for MIR tools that build toward communities of practice, and expanding the definition of “we” in MIR can be a rewarding way to connect with people excited to be part of the process.

    Most of these communities exist largely outside (or on the margins) of the commercial music industry as self-organized, “barely commercial” social, ethnic, or affinity groups. They are rather unlikely to have formal connections to university or G.L.A.M. institutions—though individuals within them will have all manner of academic, tech, non-profit, and business connections. Funding is always an issue in research and project development, particularly for projects that do not conform neatly with traditional academic incentive economies and exist in a contemporary sociopolitical climate that devalues the production of knowledge of all kinds. We don't have a key to unlock the funding problem but have found that when you invite the community in, they invest in you as well—both financially, and through a generosity of domain-specific expertise in the form of datafication, user testing, and visioning. As we invite you to join us in conversation about cyclical engagement with music-making communities, we are eager to be a part of visioning new models for funding projects of all sorts within the music encoding community.

    Speaker Bio:

    Christina has been performing and researching Jewish music for thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 as a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye, and continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has been awarded three NEH Grants for Institute projects (2021-2025). Christina lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and performs with the Zamlers Trio. She also performs with Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentschen, the Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio and many others. She has been a guest instructor in klezmer accordion and ensemble performance in the US, Canada, and Europe, and was both musical director and performer in the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the 2020 ART Portland productions of the Broadway play “Indecent.” With the Klezmer Institute, Christina edited the Levitt Legacy music folio, is curating a player folio of KMDMP music, and has led KMDMP artist residency programs in Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, France, and Belgium.


Friday, 29 May 2026: Unconference & Community Meeting

  • 9:30am - 12:30pm Unconference/IG meetings
  • 1:00pm - 2:30pm MEI Community Meeting
    MEI Community Meeting

    Annual meeting for the Music Encoding Initiative community.