ISMIR 2026 — 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference

ISMIR 2026, the 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, takes place November 8-12, 2026 at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi, UAE, with in-person and virtual registration. ISMIR is the main research venue for music and artificial intelligence: source separation, transcription, music generation and synthesis, recommendation, and evaluation of music foundation models. The 2026 edition, themed 'Crossroads', is co-organised by NYU Abu Dhabi, Zayed University and MBZUAI, and pairs peer-reviewed papers with six tutorials — including LLMs for music, attribution in music AI, and benchmarking music foundation models — plus keynotes, MIREX evaluations and late-breaking demos.

Date

November 8–12, 2026

Location

Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Format

Hybrid

Event Type

Conference

Status

Upcoming

Expected Attendance

500+

Pricing

Paid

Organizer

International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)

Added

Sep 21, 2026

Updated

Sep 21, 2026

• ✓Heads of AI at music streaming and media companies
• ✓Audio and music ML researchers
• ✓Generative AI product leads for audio
• ✓Recommendation-system engineers
• ✓Rights, licensing and AI-policy leads in media
• ✓Creative-tools and DAW product teams

For streaming, media and creative-software leaders, ISMIR is where the underlying science of their products is published first: recommendation and personalization, music foundation-model evaluation, generative audio, and — increasingly — attribution of AI-generated music to training data, which bears directly on licensing exposure. Three days here let a VP of AI or CTO benchmark in-house models against the state of the art, meet the Spotify, Sony and academic researchers setting evaluation standards, and recruit from a small, specialised talent pool that rarely appears at general AI conferences.

• ✓Tutorial T1: LLMs x Music — scalable language modeling unlocks music applications (Spotify, Sony, Upstage, CMU)
• ✓Tutorial T2: Deploying AI models to digital audio workstations using HARP
• ✓Tutorial T4: Evaluating Music Foundation Models — from MIREX to multimodal, preference-aware benchmarking
• ✓Tutorial T5: Attribution in Music AI — concepts, systems and implications (Sony AI, Neutune)
• ✓Keynotes: Robert Rowe (NYU), Charles Spence (University of Oxford), Rujing Stacy Huang (University of Hong Kong)
• ✓Paper track areas: generative tasks, analysis tasks, evaluation and datasets, responsibility and ethics, creativity, applications
• ✓MIREX evaluation campaign, Late-Breaking Demos, Call for Music and a community-building workshop

• ★The primary peer-reviewed venue for music AI — the research here is what later ships in streaming recommendation, generative audio and rights-attribution tools.
• ★Industry is on the programme, not just in the sponsor hall: 2026 tutorials are taught by researchers from Spotify, Sony, Sony AI, Upstage and Neutune.
• ★A dedicated tutorial on attribution in music AI and a 'Responsibility and Ethics in MIR' paper track address the licensing questions generative audio raises.
• ★Cheap by industry standards: $500 full in-person early-bird, or $200 to attend virtually.

USD, excluding 5% VAT. Authors: $500 full / $250 student (until 10 Aug). Non-author in-person full: $500 early-bird (to 13 Sep), $650 (14 Sep-7 Nov), $750 onsite; student $250 / $300 / $350. One-day pass $150-$250. Virtual: $200 full, $100 student. Tutorials add-on $100-$200 ($50-$100 students). In-person includes welcome reception, conference dinner, lunches and a one-year ISMIR membership.

When is ISMIR 2026?

ISMIR 2026 takes place November 8–12, 2026 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Where is ISMIR 2026 held?

ISMIR 2026 is held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The event format is hybrid.

How much does ISMIR 2026 cost?

ISMIR 2026 is paid. USD, excluding 5% VAT. Authors: $500 full / $250 student (until 10 Aug). Non-author in-person full: $500 early-bird (to 13 Sep), $650 (14 Sep-7 Nov), $750 onsite; student $250 / $300 / $350. One-day pass $150-$250. Virtual: $200 full, $100 student. Tutorials add-on $100-$200 ($50-$100 students). In-person includes welcome reception, conference dinner, lunches and a one-year ISMIR membership.

Who should attend ISMIR 2026?

ISMIR 2026 is aimed at Heads of AI at music streaming and media companies, Audio and music ML researchers, Generative AI product leads for audio, Recommendation-system engineers, Rights, licensing and AI-policy leads in media, Creative-tools and DAW product teams.

What topics does ISMIR 2026 cover?

ISMIR 2026 covers Music information retrieval, Generative music and audio synthesis, Music foundation models and LLMs, Source separation and transcription, Music recommendation and personalization, Attribution and ethics in music AI, Evaluation, datasets and reproducibility, Human-AI co-creativity.

This page was written from 8 sources, 3 on domains other than ismir2026.ismir.net.

1. 1.ismir2026.ismir.net — ismir2026.ismir.netvendor
2. 2.ismir2026.ismir.net — registrationvendor
3. 3.ismir2026.ismir.net — call for papersvendor
4. 4.ismir2026.ismir.net — tutorialsvendor
5. 5.ismir2026.ismir.net — keynotevendor
6. 6.ismir.net — ismir.net
7. 7.wp.nyu.edu — masc to co organize ismir 2026 in abu dhabi
8. 8.audiocontentanalysis.org — conferences