Hilda Romero Velo, researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (CITIC) of the Universidade da Coruña (UDC), took part in the 26th edition of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, held in Daejeon (South Korea) from 21 to 25 September 2025.

ISMIR is the leading international forum on music information retrieval, an interdisciplinary field combining computer science, musicology, mathematics, and cognitive science to address the processing, analysis, indexing, and access to musical data.

In her presentation titled Phylo-Analysis of Folk Traditions: A Methodology for the Hierarchical Musical Similarity Analysis, Hilda Romero introduced a new methodology for studying similarities between orally transmitted musical traditions. The approach is illustrated through a practical case comparing Galician and Irish repertoires, revealing stylistic connections between the two cultures.

The research also introduces an open dataset composed of 600 expert-annotated scores, on which various alignment techniques are applied to detect shared patterns at multiple levels. These techniques are assessed using genre separation metrics, allowing for comparative evaluation of their effectiveness.

Los resultados se representan en árboles filogenéticos, una visualización innovadora que refleja afinidades estilísticas y vínculos interculturales entre tradiciones musicales. Esta aproximación aporta nuevas herramientas para la investigación musicológica y etnomusicológica, abriendo caminos para el estudio comparativo en contextos internacionales.

The full article is available on the conference website.