CogMIR is a society for academic researchers and music software development professionals involved in cognitively based music informatics research. CogMIR was founded by Naresh Vempala and Frank Russo in 2011.
The field of music informatics consists of several areas pertaining to music analysis, music generation, and music information retrieval. Three wide-ranging goals are: (a) extracting features from music (audio signals as well as higher level representations such as musical scores), (b) devising useful ways of representing information extracted from music, and (c) using the extracted information to analyze music, generate new music, and retrieve musical information from databases. Several symbolic and statistical similarity-finding and pattern matching methods are currently being used by practitioners in music information retrieval. However, a majority of these methods are not based on human perception and cognition of music.
CogMIR aims to address the need for highlighting empirically derived methods based on human cognition that inform the field of music informatics and music information retrieval. The CogMIR 2011 seminar was the first seminar of its kind uniting psychologists, cognitive scientists, engineers, and musicians under one umbrella.