La 'reactable' colectiva

La 'reactable' colectiva

Artículo en El Pais sobre la Reactable (27/12/2008)  

ElPais-27-12-2008.pdf

Graduate programs on SMC for 2009-2010

Graduate programs on SMC for 2009-2010

The registration for the official Master in Sound and Music Computing 2009-2010 is now open and the first registration period ends on January 30th, 2009 (check application calendar).

A part from the SMC Master, in the academic year 2009-10 the ESMUC and the UPF will jointly offer specialized professional programs in the area of Sound and Music Computing. Specifically in the period September to December 2009 an intensive course on Music Production Technologies and Techniques will be offered and another one on Interactive Music Systems Design will be offered from January to April 2010. The official information about these courses should be available in January 2009.

Demos and software from the finished EmCAP project

Demos and software from the finished EmCAP project

EmCAP (Emergent Cognition through Active Perception) was an EU research project that finished on September 2008 in which the MTG participated. The goal of the project was to investigate cognitive behaviour in artificial systems and its emergence by interacting with the environment. The project finished with a public workshop at the end of september 2008 in which most of the outcomes of the project were presented. The talks of the workshop are available as videos.

Recently the consortium has made public here all the demos and software that were created for the project. The MTG has contributed with the Emerge Demo developed by Richard Marxer, with the Real-time What/when Expectation System developed by Amaury Hazan, with the Statistical Learning Experimenter Package developed by Amaury Hazan and Piotr Holonowicz, with a number software libraries available in here, and data collections available here.

Letusa sponsors Freesound.org

Letusa sponsors Freesound.org

With the support from the company Letusa, spanish distributor of audio equipment, we have been able to buy two new servers for Freesound.org. We just instaled the server for the database and soon we will install the main server.

Seminar by Rafael Ramirez at City University London

Seminar by Rafael Ramirez at City University London

Rafael Ramirez will give a seminar with the title "The ProSeMus Project: from Expressive Performance to Cognitive State Decoding"as part of research seminar of the Music Informatics Research Group of City University London on Monday December 15th 2008.

Abstract: In this talk we present current research carried out within the ProSeMus project. In particular, we present research on (1) expressive music performance computational modeling using machine learning techniques, (2) style-based automatic performer identification, and (3) automatic instantaneous cognitive state decoding based on a person functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. We discuss the results and describe some areas of future research. 

New research project: Music 3.0

New research project: Music 3.0

The MTG has started a new research project funded by the program Avanza Contenidos of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Turism and Trade. The main goal of the project Music 3.0 is to develop an experimental web-based system for music creation, interaction and socialization. Such system should integrate the most recent technologies of the Web 2.0, advanced on-line tools for music creation, and large sound and music repositories. For such system there will be a need to develop social networking models specific for music, models for the treatment of music content and also models for the creation of new content.

Premis al projecte empresarial de la Reactable

Premis al projecte empresarial de la Reactable

El projecte d'empresa Reactable Systems guanya dos premis dins del 8è Concurs d'Idees de Negoci, iniciativa d'ACC10 CIDEM-COPCA. Reactable Systems és la iniciativa empresarial de Sergi Jordà, Günter Geiger, Martin Kaltenbrunner i Marcos Alonso, per a posar al mercat la Reactable.

Updated version of SMS code

Updated version of SMS code

Rich Eakin, Master student working at the MTG, has updated the open source Spectral Modeling Synthesis C software library originally developed by Xavier Serra for his PhD thesis in 1989. The library, called libsms, is distributed with source code and under GNU license and it has been tested with Ubuntu. Rich has also added a Pd (Pure Data) library of externals alongside libsms to be used for real-time applications.

Seminar by Masataka Goto on Active Listening Interfaces

Seminar by Masataka Goto on Active Listening Interfaces

Masataka Goto, senior research scientist at AIST, will be giving a research seminar on December 9th 2008 at 11am on the França Auditorium with the title "Active Music Listening Interfaces Based on Music-Understanding Technologies".

Abstract:

People who can actively interact with music have traditionally been considered musicians in the sense that "actively" implies the creation of music. On the other hand, ordinary people have been just listeners who could interact with music only passively. When the recording of music to audio storage media became a reality, however, some people started interacting with music in more active ways, for example, by specifying the playback order of songs or adjusting frequency characteristics by using tone controls. Recent advances in computer and music-understanding technologies will further affect how people interact with music.

In this seminar, I will introduce our research aimed at building "Active Music Listening Interfaces" [M. Goto, Proc. of IEEE ICASSP 2007] to demonstrate the importance of music-understanding technologies and the benefit they offer to ordinary people (end users). Active music listening is a way of listening to music through active interactions. Given polyphonic sound mixtures taken from available music recordings, our interfaces enrich end-users' music listening experiences by applying our automatic music-understanding technologies based on signal processing. In this research, "active" does not mean the creation of new music, but any active experience that is part of enjoying music. For example, our active music listening interface with a chorus-search function, "SmartMusicKIOSK" [M. Goto, IEEE Trans. ASLP, Vol.14, No.5, 2006], enables a user to skim rapidly through a musical piece by easily skipping sections of no interest while viewing a visual representation of music structure. During the playback of a song, "LyricSynchronizer" [H. Fujihara et al., Proc. of IEEE ISM 2006] with a lyrics synchronization function displays scrolling lyrics and highlights the phrase currently sung. A user can easily follow the current playback position and click on a word in the lyrics to listen to it. By suppressing drum sounds and adding other drum sounds, "Drumix" [K. Yoshii et al., IPSJ Journal, Vol.48, No.3, 2007] with a drum-sound recognition function enables a user to change the volume and timbre of drum sounds and rearrange rhythmic patterns of these drum sounds during playback. These interfaces can also be regarded as "Augmented Music-Understanding Interfaces" that facilitate deeper understanding of music by end users.

 

Seminar by Emilia Gomez on MIR and Flamenco music

Seminar by Emilia Gomez on MIR and Flamenco music

Emilia Gomez will be giving a research seminar on Thursday November 27th 2008 at 3pm in room 103 of the França building with the title: "Music Analysis, Similarity and Classification based on Chroma Features: Examples of the Study of Flamenco Music"

Abstract: Chroma features are widely used in the Music Information Retrieval field for a wide range of applications. They are computed from audio recordings and they represent the pitch class distribution of a musical piece. Most of the work until now has focused on the analysis of music from the Western tradition, but we might ask if the available methods are suitable when analyzing music from other cultures. I will present some of my work on this field, focusing on the use of chroma features for harmonic and tonal analysis of polyphonic audio and music similarity. I will also put forward some research on the comparative analysis of music from different parts of the world by means of chroma feature extraction and data mining techniques. I will illustrate the talk with some excerpts of flamenco music, characterized by the presence of microtonality and a high degree of ornamentation.