Welcome to the 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010). ISMIR 2010 will be convened in Utrecht, Netherlands, 9-13 August 2010 and is jointly organised by Utrecht University, the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Meertens Institute and Philips Research. The organisers have a strong conviction (which we believe is widely shared by the MIR community) that studying the human processing of music is a key issue in innovative MIR research. Therefore, MIR research and applications that model musical cognition and perception, that contribute to the human understanding and experience of music, or that make creative use of MIR research receive particular attention during ISMIR 2010. ISMIR conferences have a long tradition of high quality interdisciplinary scholarship. We hope that you will find that these proceedings have met the high standards of excellence reached by previous ISMIR Program Committees (PC) and participating Music Information Retrieval (MIR) researchers. Like earlier ISMIRs, the success of ISMIR 2010 is founded upon the hard work of its 24 PC members, the thoughtful adjudications of its 262 reviewers, and the large number (176) of first-rate submissions it received from its vibrant research community. ISMIR 2010 builds upon lessons learned from earlier ISMIR conferences and thus has carried on many practices from ISMIR’s past. ISMIR 2010 submissions were reviewed double-blind to avoid bias. Each accepted paper was allotted six pages of proceedings space. As in the past, there was no quality distinction made concerning the mode of presentation (whether poster or oral). Those papers chosen for oral presentation were selected solely on the grounds of providing ISMIR 2010 participants with a conference programme that best reflected the wide-ranging interests, techniques and findings of ISMIR’s multidisciplinary world. Unlike recent ISMIRs, there was no rebuttal phase because of the shortened review timelines caused by ISMIR 2010’s earlier-than-usual August meeting date. ...