The Games We Play: Exploring the Impact of ISMIR on Musicology

Throughout history, a consistent temporal and spatial gap has persisted between the inception of novel knowledge and technology and their subsequent adoption for extensive practical utilization. The article explores the dynamic interaction and exchange of methodologies between musicology and computational music research. It focuses on an analysis of ten years' worth of papers from the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) from 2012 to 2021. Over 1000 citations of ISMIR papers were reviewed, and out of these, 51 later works published in musicological venues drew from the findings of 28 ISMIR papers. Final results reveal that most contributions from ISMIR rarely make their way to musicology or humanities. Nevertheless, the paper highlights four examples of successful knowledge transfers between the fields and discusses best practices for collaborations while addressing potential causes for such disparities. In the epilogue, we address the interlaced origins of the problem as stemming from the language of new media, institutional restrictions, and the inability to engage in multidisciplinary communication.