Music is created by humans for other humans, and humans can bring a tremendous amount of contextual knowledge to bear on anything they do; in fact, they can't avoid it, and they're rarely conscious of it. But (as of early 2008) computers can never bring much contextual knowledge to bear, often none at all, and never without being specifically programmed to do so. Therefore doing almost anything with music by computers is very difficult; many problems are essentially intractable. For the forseeable future, the only way to make significant progress is by doing as well as possible with very little context, thereby sidestepping the intractable problems.

(I wrote the above statement for my Spring 2008 graduate seminar, Organization and Searching of Musical Information. I described it, with tongue firmly in cheek, as a "theorem"; a more accurate term would be "axiom" or "dogma". It's probably too strongly worded, but I think it comes close to describing a very basic problem that almost all music-informatics research has to deal with. Thanks to Paul Lamere for his interest in this idea.   --Don Byrd, September 2008)