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Master's student Yining Yang earns spot at world's leading music technology conference
via Don Wright Faculty of Music
Yining Yang, a Master of Music (Performance) student, has been selected to present her research at the 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2026), one of the world's premier gatherings of music technology researchers and practitioners. The conference will take place in Abu Dhabi from November 8 to 12, 2026. ISMIR is recognized as the largest international research venue dedicated to Music Information Retrieval, an interdisciplinary field focused on the analysis, organization, and understanding of music-related data.
Yang's paper "CODA: Cascaded Online Discontinuity-Aware Alignment for Real-Time Image-Based Score Following," was accepted through a competitive peer-review process and will be presented alongside research from leading universities and organizations around the world. The paper was co-authored with Ruogu Chen and Jie Han from the University of Alberta.
While the title may sound highly technical, the research addresses a practical challenge faced by musicians and music technology developers: helping computers understand exactly where a performer is in a musical score as they play.
The system developed by Yang and her collaborators can follow a live performance in real time, even when musicians make interpretive choices that differ from the printed score. This capability supports a range of interactive applications, including automatic digital page-turning, synchronized score displays, and intelligent accompaniment systems.
"As a performer, I'm interested in how technology can respond to musicians in real time rather than asking musicians to adapt to the technology," said Yang. "This project grew from building a system that can understand where a performer is in the score, even when the performance doesn't unfold exactly as written."
As a violist as well as a researcher, Yang brings a performer's perspective to the development of music technologies. Her work reflects a growing area of research that combines musical artistry with advances in machine learning and real-time computational analysis.
The research was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
For a master's student, acceptance to ISMIR represents a significant accomplishment. The conference attracts researchers from around the world working at the forefront of music information retrieval, artificial intelligence, music analysis and interactive music systems.
Yang's acceptance highlights the contributions that emerging scholars at Western are making to the future of music performance and technology.