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Preliminary Round Site Judge Sign-Up! Competition Rules

Welcome to the official site for RenCon 2025, an international challenge where researchers and developers submit systems capable of rendering expressive musical performances from symbolic scores. This year, we are delighted to hosted it along with ISMIR 2025 and under the MIREX Tasks protocol.

The RenCon competition has a rich history, having record for compeition in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008 and 2011 ([1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), jointly with conferences like SMC, NIME, ICMPC and IJCAI. Even before the term “AI” was widely used, the RenCon competition has been a platform for researchers to showcase their work in the field of expressive performance rendering. However, not too much of its past can be traced today, except an old site. We hope to revive this tradition with RenCon 2025, coinciding with the renewed global focus on performance during this year’s Chopin Piano Competition.

Competition Structure

RenCon 2025 is structured in two phases:

  • Phase 1 – Preliminary Round (Online)
    Submit performances of assigned and free-choice pieces. Includes symbolic or audio renderings and a technical report. No real-time constraints allow for broader participation and diversity in evaluation. The submission period is open from May 20, 2025 to Aug 20, 2025, following the MIREX submission guidelines. After the submission deadline, the preliminary round page will be finalized with the list of participants and their submissions, and the online evaluation will take place.

  • Phase 2 – Live Contest at ISMIR (Daejeon, Korea)
    Top systems from preliminary round will be invited to render a surprise piece live at ISMIR, using their system in real time. The live contest is open to all ISMIR attendees, as well as general public if the venue allows. The audience will be able to listen to the live performances and vote for their favorite system. The winner will be announced at the end of the conference.

Timeline

  • May 20, 2025: Preliminary round submission opens, online judge sign-up opens
  • Aug 20, 2025: Preliminary round submission closes
  • Aug 25, 2025: Preliminary round page finalized and online evaluation begins
  • Sept 10, 2025: Online evaluation ends, results announced, and top systems invited to live contest
  • Sept 2*, 2025(TBD): Live contest at ISMIR 2025 in Daejeon, Korea

Submission Requirements

Submissions must minimize human intervention and clearly describe any post-processing.

Organizers and Contact

  • Huan Zhang, Task Captain, Queen Mary University of London
  • Junyan Jiang, MIREX Facilitator, New York University
  • Simon Dixon, Queen Mary University of London
  • Gus Xia, MBZUAI
  • Akira Maezawa, Yamaha

For any inquiries, please contact us at huan.zhang@qmul.ac.uk

Prizes

Long-Term Vision

RenCon will return every 2–3 years to capture meaningful advances in the field. We welcome collaboration from the community to grow this initiative.

References

  • [1] RenCon 2002: "The Second Rencon: Performance Contest, Panel Discussion, and the Future", Rumi Hiraga, Roberto Bresin, Haruhiro Katayose
  • [2] RenCon 2004: "Rencon 2004: Turing Test for Musical Expression", Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Rumi Hiraga, Roberto Bresin, Keiji Hirata, Haruhiro Katayose
  • [3] RenCon 2005: "RenCon 2005", The 20th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2006, Rumi Hiraga, Roberto Bresin, Haruhiro Katayose
  • [4] RenCon 2008: "Rencon: Performance Rendering Contest for Automated Music Systems", Proceedings of the 10 th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC 10). Sapporo, Japan; Mitsuyo Hashida, Teresa M. Nakra, Haruhiro Katayose, Tadahiro Murao, Keiji Hirata, Kenji Suzuki, Tetsuro Kitahara
  • [5] RenCon 2011: "RenCon workshop 2011 (SMC–RenCon): Performance rendering contest for computer systems", Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC), 2011, Mitsuyo Hashida, Keiji Hirata, Haruhiro Katayose