Title and abstract¶

Reusable software and reproducibility in music informatics research
Mark D Plumbley, Simon Dixon, and Chris Cannam
Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London

The need to develop and reuse software to process data is almost
universal in music informatics research. Many methods, including most
of those published at ISMIR, are developed in tandem with software
implementations, and some of them are too complex or too fundamentally
software-based to be reproduced readily from a published paper
alone. For this reason, it is helpful for sustainable research to have
software and data published along with papers.

In practice, non-publication of code and data is still the norm and
research software is commonly lost following publication of the
associated methods.

During this tutorial we will discuss common barriers to publication of
software and data, and will present a practical hands-on session in
which attendees will explore tools and methods to help them overcome
these barriers.

The tutorial will rapidly cover the use of version control software,
code hosting facilities, aspects of testing and provenance, and
software licensing for publication. Worked examples will be drawn from
the music and audio fields, and hands-on help will be provided by a
team of experienced researcher-developers from the Centre for Digital
Music such as Luis Figueira, Steve Welburn and Marco Fabiani.

This tutorial will be of immediate practical interest to researchers
within the music informatics community, and will also be highly
relevant to research supervisors and research group leaders with an
interest in policy and guidance.