Home 9 Test-of-Time Awards

Test-of-Time Awards

Test-of-Time Awards

The ISMIR Test of Time Awards recognize papers that have had a significant and lasting impact on the field of Music Information Retrieval. The awards celebrate research whose ideas, methods, datasets, or perspectives have remained influential beyond their original publication.

Two Test of Time Awards are presented:

  • Classical Test of Time Award: Recognizes influential papers from the early years of ISMIR, highlighting foundational work that has shaped the development of the field.
  • Ten-Year Test of Time Award: Recognizes outstanding papers published approximately ten years earlier whose impact and continued relevance have become evident over the subsequent decade.

The Test of Time Awards were introduced in 2024 as part of ISMIR’s 25th anniversary celebrations.

2025

Classical Test-of-Time Award

Audio Matching via Chroma-Based Statistical Features
Meinard Müller, Frank Kurth, and Michael Clausen

AIST Annotation for the RWC Music Database
Masataka Goto

10-Year Test-of-Time Award

An Efficient State-Space Method for Joint Tempo and Meter Tracking
Florian Krebs, Sebastian Böck, and Gerhard Widmer

10-Year Test-of-Time Award Runner-Up

A Software Framework For Musical Data Augmentation
Brian McFee, Eric J. Humphrey, and Juan P. Bello

2024

Classical Test-of-Time Award

Automatic Musical Genre Classification of Audio Signals
George Tzanetakis, George Essl, and Perry Cook