Authors:
Cathal Gurrin, Dublin City University, Ireland
Multimedia research is framed through algorithms, datasets, and systems, but at its heart lies content that is deeply human. Few forms of content illustrate this better than classical music. Long before music becomes data to be recorded, generated, searched, or retrieved, it is imagined by composers and brought to life by performers. At ACM Multimedia 2025 in Dublin, this human origin of multimedia took centre stage in a unique social event that bridged classical music and multimedia content analysis. This event was the fourth supported by ACM SIGMM in the framework of Music Meets Science program (at CBMI’2022, CBMI’2023, CBMI’2024).
Music Meets Science explores musical spaces across centuries and styles, from the dynamic Folia of Vivaldi and Handel’s Passacaglia to works by Schubert and contemporary composers from around the world. The goal here is to bring a wide range of music performed by some of the original content creators, our classical musicians, to the multimedia research community, who explore and mine this content. It brings fundamental cultural values to the young researchers in Multimedia, opening their minds to classical and contemporary music which oscillates with the rhythm of centuries.
The concert took place on 29 October, starting at 8:00 PM, during the Welcome Reception of ACM Multimedia 2025. It was attended by over 1,000 delegates of all ages from doctoral students to senior researchers. The programme featured music by Irish composer Garth Knox and a new composition by Finnish composer Jarno Vanhanen, written especially for ACM Multimedia. The performance was delivered by internationally acclaimed French musicians of the new generation: François Pineau-Benois (violin) and Olivier Marin (viola), see Figure 1. Together, they invited the audience to experience music not only as sound, but as rich multimedia content shaped by structure, expression, interpretation, and context.
By embedding live performance within a major multimedia conference, Music Meets Science highlights the importance of integrating creative arts into the research ecosystem. As multimedia research continues to advance, from content understanding to generation, events like this remind us that artistic practice is not just an application domain, but a source of inspiration. Strengthening the dialogue between creative arts and multimedia research can deepen our understanding of content, context, and meaning, and enrich the future directions of the field.