Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Genesis of Meaning in Sound and Music: 5th International Symposium, CMMR 2008 Copenhagen, Denmark, May 19-23, 2008 Revised Papers

CMMR is an annual event focusing on important aspects of computer music. CMMR 2008 was the fifth event in this series and was co-organized by Aal- borg University Esb jerg, Denmark (http://www.aaue.dk), the Laboratoire de Meecanique et d’Acoustique, CNRS in Marseille, France (http:/www.lma.cnrs- mrs.fr) and the Network for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning, University of Southern Denmark (http://www.ntsmb.dk/). The conference was held in Copenhagen, May 19–23, 2008.

The four previous editions of CMMR gathered a large number of notewor- thy papers by researchers from the field of computer music. The proceedings of these conferences were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (LNCS 2771, LNCS 3310, LNCS 3902 and LNCS 4969). The present edi- tion follows the lineage of the previous ones, including a collection of 21 papers specially reviewed and corrected for this proceedings volume. The field of computer music embraces a large number of research areas that span from information retrieval, programming, artificial intelligence to acous- tics, signal processing and sound modeling. In the last CMMR gatherings an increased emphasis was placed on the role of human interaction at all levels of musical practice, as well as perceptual and cognitive aspects in order to establish relations between the structure of sounds and their impact on human beings. The identification of perceptually relevant sound structures is linked to the notion of the sense of sounds, which was the title of the CMMR 2007 conference.

CMMR 2008 further expanded the “Sense of Sounds” concept by taking into account the musical structure as a whole by proposing the theme “Gen- esis of Meaning in Sound and Music”. The purpose was to establish rigorous research alliances between computer and engineering sciences (information re- trieval, programming, acoustics, signal processing) and areas within the hu- manities (in particular perception, cognition, musicology, philosophy), and to globally address the notion of sound meaning and its implications in music, modeling and retrieval. As a step in this direction, NTSMB, the Network for Cross-Disciplinary Studies of Music and Meaning as well as JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning participated in CMMR 2008. The conference was partly supported by the French National Agency (ANR) within the pro ject senSons (http://www.sensons.cnrs-mrs.fr).

The current book is divided into two main chapters, one that concerns re- trieval of meaning and another that concerns generation of meaning. The first part of the retrieval chapter deals with perceptual and cognitive aspects span- ning from EEG analysis to social interaction analysis through movement capture, while the second part addresses more traditional music information retrieval issues linked to synchronization, labeling, music query and classification. The generation chapter presents music performance strategies and experiences as well as tools for score analyses and representation.

We would like to thank the Program Committee members for their valuable paper reports and thank all the participants who made CMMR 2008 Genesis of Meaning in Sounds and Music a stimulating and unique event. Finally, we would like to thank Springer for accepting to publish the CMMR 2008 proceedings in their LNCS series.