PhD candidate Ananth Venkatesh will be presenting a paper in person on Physiology-driven Music Retrieval Using Contrastive Learning (Tuesday, 10 November, 11h30–13h Asia/Dubai, UTC+4)) and Elaine Chew will be a panelist in an online special session on Music and Health (Monday, 9 November, 13h-14h Asia/Dubai, UTC+4) at the Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval to take place at New York University Abu Dhabi on 8-12 November 2026. Details below.
This is the first time ISMIR is held in the Arab world. The theme will be “Crossroads,” highlighting the region’s centuries-old history as the intersection of cultures around the rim of the Indian Ocean and South China sea, and exploring potential intersections between MIR and the humanities, other sensory modalities besides audition (synaesthesia), social impact and health in special sessions.
Lunch Special Session: Music and Health
Mon, Nov 9, 13:00 – 14:00 (Asia/Dubai)
Room: A6-008
Convener: Anja Volk (Utrecht University)
Panelists:
- Kat Agres (Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and National University of Singapore)
- Michael A. Casey (Dartmouth College)
- Elaine Chew (King’s College London)
- Jacob Harrison (Nordoff and Robbins)
In this special session, we discuss emerging opportunities to develop and employ methods from MIR for the field of music, health, medicine and wellbeing. Bringing together experts from MIR, music therapy and cognitive science, we showcase examples of collaborations between these fields, such as MIR in Cardiovascular Medicine, Neuro-responsive MIR for epilepsy and other brain disorders, serious games for music therapy, real-time affective music generation for emotion regulation, and the role of technology for collaborative music-making in the context of the Nordoff & Robbins approach in music therapy. While these examples show a large bandwith of use cases of developing technology for the field of music and health, the topic remains understudied at ISMIR. We therefore discuss opportunities and challenges for MIR researchers to engage in this field, taking the different perspectives of the panelists from music therapy, cognitive science and MIR into account, and identify potential short a long-term goals of the collaboration.
P6-10: Physiology-Driven Music Retrieval Using Contrastive Learning
Tue, Nov 10, 11:30 – 13:00 (Asia/Dubai)
Oral Session 6; Poster Session 6
Ananth Venkatesh, Elaine Chew
Physiological signals provide a direct view of how music affects the body, yet remain underexplored as a retrieval modality. Prior work largely maps such signals onto low-dimensional valence–arousal representations, which are subjective and limited as ground truth. We frame physiology-driven music retrieval as a cross-modal contrastive learning task, investigating whether stimulus identity can be recovered directly from electrocardiographic traces and respiration signals of 110 participants listening to 30 classical piano performances. Both physiological and acoustic modalities are summarised using distributional statistics with participant-wise normalisation. Analysis using Earth Mover’s Distance shows true stimulus–response pairs align more strongly than random pairings (88.7% vs 50%, p < 0.001), indicating that the response contains a track specific signature within participants. A contrastive model trained with InfoNCE generalises this across participants to achieve Recall@1 = 0.662, Recall@2 = 0.909, and MRR = 0.814 in a 9-way retrieval task (p < 0.005). Reverse (music-to-physiology) retrieval collapses to chance, indicating shared stimulus-specific responses rather than individual responses. Despite the music features inducing a modest influence, explaining 14.1% of the variance in the physiological response, the effect is consistent across individuals and is sufficient to support cross-modal retrieval directly using physiological queries.
Paper: https://ismir2026program.ismir.net/poster_201.html#paper
Poster: https://ismir2026program.ismir.net/poster_201.html#poster
Video: https://ismir2026program.ismir.net/poster_201.html#video
For further details like the full reviews, Slack channel, Zoom for the poster session, and warm-up discussion, visit https://ismir2026program.ismir.net/poster_201.html#details
