Welcome to the first Workshop on...

Exploring Musical Cognition Through Musical Agent Systems

Workshop at the 49th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence - KI 2026
Bremen, Germany - 12 August 2026

We invite contributions to Music Cognition 2026: Exploring Musical Cognition through Musical Agent Systems, a half-day workshop to be held at the 49th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2026) in Bremen on 12 August 2026. Music has is a long-standing domain of AI research, ranging from music understanding and generation similar to language understanding to exploring theories of creativity and building effective tools that support humans in advanced cognitive tasks. Moreover, AI techniques are applied in the music industry, e.g., Microsoft's Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model CLAP is used for classifying music or for information retrieval. Music cognition is a multi-disciplinary field of research, bringing together artistic, behavioral, theoretical, and computational perspectives that adapt an information-processing approach to understand musical knowledge and to apply it in artistic contexts. As such, it is a sub-area of cognition -- therefore, this workshop is co-organized by FBKI's working group on cognition. In AI, music cognition widely adopts the notion of an intelligent agent, sometimes called musical agent systems and all facets of intelligent agents are studied, i.e., perceptio, creative reasoning, and acting using robotic agents.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

Musical agent systems and musical interaction
AI models of musical listening, perception, and understanding
Machine listening and music information retrieval
Computational models of musical creativity
Conceptual blending, reasoning, and knowledge representation in musical contexts
Generative AI for music, sound, and performance
Corpus-based approaches to musical analysis, decomposition, and transformation
Human-AI interaction in musical practice
Robotic, embodied, or situated musical agents
Improvisation with interactive and autonomous systems
AI-supported composition, performance, and sound art
Artistic research involving AI, cognition, and music
Critical, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives on musical AI
Challenges, open problems, and desiderata from artistic practice for AI research
Evaluation criteria and shared vocabularies for musical agent systems

Keynote

photo: Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, research professor in music composition and theory at Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana is known aside his musical works for the software FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation) that leverages digital techniques such as machine learning to music.

Workshop Format

As this workshop is dedicated to community building and the discussion of emerging research questions, we invite several types of contributions.

Original Research Contributions: We welcome short papers or extended abstracts presenting original research on AI, music cognition, musical agents, interactive systems, computational creativity, or related topics.
Presentations of Recently Published Work: In order to foster exchange within the community, we also invite presentations of relevant papers, systems, or artistic research projects that have recently been published or presented elsewhere.
System Demonstrations: Participants may submit proposals for demonstrations of musical agent systems, machine listening tools, interactive performance systems, AI-based composition environments, robotic musical systems, or related technologies.
Artistic Research Contributions: We particularly also encourage artistic researchers, composers, performers, and sound artists to submit contributions that present artistic works, performance practices, compositional approaches, or critical reflections involving AI and music.
Challenges for AI Researchers: Practitioners from music, sound art, composition, performance, and artistic research are invited to formulate open problems, challenges, or desiderata for AI researchers. These may address technical, musical, aesthetic, conceptual, or ethical questions.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be submitted via EasyChair to the respective track for this workshop, indicating the type of contribution. Please include:

Title of the contribution
Name, affiliation, and contact information of all contributors
Contribution type: original research, recently published work, system demonstration, artistic research contribution, or challenge statement
Abstract or description of the contribution
Short biography of the presenting author or authors
Technical requirements, if applicable
Links to documentation, media, code, recordings, or publications, where relevant

For original research contributions, we invite short papers (up to 6 pages in Springer's LNCS style, excluding references) or extended abstracts (up to 3 pages in Sprinegr's LNCS style, excluding references). For demonstrations, artistic research contributions, and challenge statements, a concise written description is sufficient. Presentations of already published work are welcome, provided that the original publication venue is clearly indicated.

Submissions will receive a light review to confirm suitability for the program.

Important Dates

Workshop date: Wednesday, August 12, 2026; 9:00 - 12:30 (room TBA)
Location: KI 2026, Bremen, Germany
Submission deadline: July 15th 2026
Notification of acceptance: July 25th 2026
Link to submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ki2026