We are pleased to welcome you to the 16th edition of CMMR which will be held as a face-to-face event. CMMR 2023 will be held in Tokyo, in November 2023, and will be the first face-to-face social activity for CMMR in four years. All presentations and conference events will take place on-site, and some of them will be shared with the audience all over the world, as well. We hope that by participating in CMMR 2023 and actively interacting with each other, you will be able to intensively exchange ideas, gain rich inspiration, and make great progress in your research.  

Since there has been a long and winding road to the in-person CMMR 2023, I would like to take a moment to reflect on it here. Originally, the CMMR 2020 Committee was formed in the spring of 2019 to prepare for CMMR 2020 to be held in November in Tokyo. However, CMMR 2020 was cancelled and postponed for one year because the corona pandemic showed no sign of abating at that time. The call for papers for CMMR 2021 was issued in January 2021 without it having been decided whether to hold the conference in-person or online, but ultimately the decision was made to hold CMMR 2021 completely online in April of the same year. In CMMR 2021, we had 33 technical papers, 13 musical works, and 264 participants from around the world. However, the experience of organizing and managing CMMR 2021, which was a completely online international conference, provided an opportunity to realize the importance of holding international conferences in-person.

We have been struggling with the global corona disaster for almost three years (as of December 2022). At last, I think we have come to the point where we can foresee the end of COVID-19 infection. We considered that if CMMR were to be held in November, 2023, by that time the world would be largely restored to normality and bustling with activity. Therefore, the CMMR 2023 Committee was formed in the spring of 2022, with the aim of holding CMMR 2023 in-person, in Tokyo.

Most of the CMMR 2021 Committee members agreed with our intentions and so joined the CMMR 2023 Committee. In this way, the CMMR 2023 began its activities. Incidentally, three years of constrained online activity has conversely led us to notice a new format of participation in international conferences with wider coverage and greater flexibility. Thus, CMMR 2023 aims at realizing a CMMR that combines a face-to-face international conference with online participation of people around the world.

The conference theme established for CMMR 2023 is “Music: Bridge after the turmoil.”
Here, the bridge has several meanings. Firstly, it is a bridge that connects researchers who have been divided by the Corona disaster. Also, it is a bridge connecting the multidisciplinary research fields that CMMR is aiming for, and a bridge between the CMMR’s of the past and the CMMR’s of the future. Then, music, which is the subject of CMMR, is also a bridge to bring different things together, a bridge to unite things that are far apart, and a bridge to overcome academic challenges. By considering music as a bridge in this way, we can certainly deepen the multidisciplinary research centered on music and informatics. I look forward to discussing music as a bridge with you all at CMMR 2023.

We are delighted to include three keynote speakers who will deliver speeches based on the conference theme “Music: Bridge after the turmoil”; Dr. Shigeki Sagayama (Visiting Professor, Univ. of Electro-Communications, Japan), Dr. Yi-Hsuan Yang (Full Professor, the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University), and Dr. Tatsuya Daikoku (Project Assistant Professor, International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo, Japan). These three keynote talks will surely open the door to new multidisciplinary research for individual participants.

On behalf of the CMMR 2023 Committee, I hope that many of you will be reunited with your colleagues and that newcomers will also join us, sparking lively discussions and starting new research.

Keiji Hirata
General Chair