Getting Closer to the Essence of Music: The Con Espressione Manifesto
It addresses the problem of superficial music analysis in MIR for researchers, but is incremental as it outlines existing ideas rather than introducing new methods.
The paper critiques current Music Information Research (MIR) for lacking deep understanding of music and proposes six generally agreed but often ignored truths about music as challenges for future research.
This text offers a personal and very subjective view on the current situation of Music Information Research (MIR). Motivated by the desire to build systems with a somewhat deeper understanding of music than the ones we currently have, I try to sketch a number of challenges for the next decade of MIR research, grouped around six simple truths about music that are probably generally agreed on, but often ignored in everyday research.