Whose future is it?

Good morning. It is a great honour to deliver this talk to a research community of which I have been a member when we were not sure that it was a domain of its own. It has since then developed in an impressive manner, and today it offers all the signs of a maturing scientific community in a technical field: a yearly conference with growing attendance, some structuring paradigms, progress in modelling its challenges, attraction for bright graduate students, evaluation testbeds and benchmarks. That’s exactly when a community generally puts itself on tracks that will lead it to deliver little or much progress for science, little or much usefulness for society. That’s when it is worth for such a community to think a while about where it tries to go, to take [Slide: one step aside]. This honour is also a challenge. If I were totally ignorant about information retrieval and content processing of music, it would be much more comfortable. I would share with you some general thoughts about property and commons for information and information technology, about how research funding mechanisms and intellectual property rules influence the targets of research efforts. And from my blissful ignorance, I would leave you with the task of figuring out what it can mean for you and the ISMIR community. But I can’t. I know just enough about music information retrieval to feel forced to connect my general thinking with concrete examples in this domain and neighbouring fields. Inevitably, I will say a few stupidities in this process. I hope you won’t stop there, at identifying these mistakes, that you will still try to understand the issues I am raising, and only then, decide if they are worth your consideration.