Interacting with Digital Music

It seems that every week there is a new Digital Music product and service and every week another major deal is announced. That is the intensively competitive Digital Music market today. For those of us lucky enough to work in Digital Music research, these are exciting times with almost boundless possibilities. These are made possible by recent advances in musical signal (or content) analysis, which is increasingly able to capture the underlying musical intent in a recording. Consequently, research communities around the world have been increasingly mobilized to respond to the research challenges that the market presents. This paper presents a view from the United Kingdom describing how we have become better organized, particularly by means of a research practitioners network called the Digital Music Research Network. It continues with an overview of some relevant research at one UK university, Queen Mary University of London, and then presents a personal view of how research practice might evolve in the future.