Music Informatics is emerging interdisciplinary research areas dealing with the production, distribution, and consumption of music through technology (especially in digital formats).

MI research topics include music technologies such as iPods, peer-to-peer application, digital audio editors, online music search engines and Music Information Retrieval (MIR); cognitive, social, and economic issues in music; as well as improvisation and music performance. MI studies this range of topics not only to better design music search and retrieval systems, but to develop a fundamental understanding of the nature of music and its associated behaviors as well. Because MI is an emerging discipline, it is a very dynamic area of research with many diverse viewpoints. The future of MI is yet to be determined.

Sub-topics in Music Informatics research

• Interdisciplinary relationships in Music Informatics
• The digital revolution in music its impact on music information services and music libraries
• Knowledge of current trends in music technologies including software and hardware
• Mental models in the cognition of music listening and performing
• Social and economic realities of the consumption of music in Western societies
• Improvisation in music, especially where it is facilitated by music technology
• Music digital libraries and collections architectures
• Future of music distribution, the music industry, and music libraries
• Music Information Retrieval
  Music information retrieval
  Music information retrieval is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications...
  
  
• Music Recommendation systems
• Studying and Synthesizing Music Expression
• Audio Signal-to-Score (singing, polyphonic, piano, etc.)
• Music Analysis
• Musical Accompaniment Systems
• Score Following
• Optical Music Recognition (OMR)
• Music Source Separation
• Music for Computer Games
• MIDI to Symbolic Score

Music informatics in education

Music informatics, as a degree

Academic degree

An academic degree is a position and title within a college or university that is usually awarded in recognition of the recipient having either satisfactorily completed a prescribed course of study or having conducted a scholarly endeavour deemed worthy of his or her admission to the degree...

 subject, offers a similar learning experience to music technology

Music technology

Music technology is a term that refers to all forms of technology involved with the musical arts, particularly the use of electronic devices and computer software to facilitate playback, recording, composition, storage and performance. This subject is taught at many different educational levels,...

, but goes further into learning the principles behind the technology. Informatics students will not just use existing music hardware and software, but will learn programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.