UPF gathered the best European music researchers
With some 200 participants, from 11 to 13 June, at the first European Research Music Conference, organized by the Music Technology Group and the European Research Council. A showcase for projects funded by the European Commission related to all areas of music: musicology, music technology, as well as artificial intelligence, neuroscience and cognition.
The European Research Music Conference came to a close on 13 June with successful audience numbers of about 200 participants registered for the scientific part. This first edition was jointly organized by the Music Technology Group (MTG) of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF and the communication project ERC=Science2. The event programme was notable for its cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and informative nature, designed to reach as broad a public as possible, domestic and international. The conference took place at Pompeu Fabra University from 11 to 13 June in the auditorium of the Poblenou campus (sessions), in the Aranyó hall (concerts) and other activities took place at the Conservatori Municipal music school of Barcelona.
The opening ceremony took place on 11 June at 9.30 pm in the auditorium of the UPF Poblenou campus and was presided over by Jaume Casals, rector of Pompeu Fabra University, who opened the conference, together with Xavier Serra, director of the MTG; Miquel Àngel Essomba, commissioner for Education and Universities of the City Council, and Natalia Grzomba, representative of the ERC=Science2.
Twenty top-level researchers, who are leading renowned projects with European Research Council grants awarded by the European Commission, presented their music research projects in such diverse areas as musicology, music technology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and musical cognition.
The conference was articulated around seven plenary sessions that could be watched live through streaming, the main aim of which was to disseminate and discuss the projects funded by the European Commission and were given by researchers on the mornings of 11, 12 and 13 June in the Auditorium of the Poblenou campus, as well as oral and poster presentations that were displayed in the Auditorium vestibule.
One of the speakers was Xavier Serra, co-organizer of the conference, with his presentation: ”Computational models for the discovery of the world’s music” (session 2 of 11 June), given that he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in 2011 for the project CompMusic, which focuses on the creation of music analysis technologies that take music’s cultural specificities into account. Thanks to these technologies he aims to break with the hegemony of the Western cultural model used in most current research and technological developments. Serra is the director of the Music Technology Group (MTG) at UPF and his research focuses on audio signal processing, music technology and computational musicology.
The event programme was notable for its cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and informative nature, designed to reach as broad a public as possible, domestic and international
The afternoons of 11 and 12 June were to showcase the concerts, performed within the proceedings of the conference and with the participation of PHONOS. In the first concert, Paulo de Assis, Lucia D’Errico and Juan Parra challenged the audience with the multimedia and experimental Rasch27, and Ulrich Mertin and Nermin Kaygusuz’s viola and kemençe duo played traditional Ottoman and Western contemporary music. The next concert, on 12 June, focused on the notion of gesture. The first part was devoted to the FluCoMa project by Pierre A. Tremblay, and in the second, Atau Tanaka and Michael F. Zbszynski disseminated works derived from the Meta Gesture Music project, focusing on the study of the physiology of the body in musical performance.
Finally, on 12 June at 7pm at the Conservatori Municipal music school of Barcelona a round table was held, open to the general public entitled “Living music: alternative ways in the world of research”, mainly aimed at spreading among the students of the Conservatori that musical research goes far beyond what they might imagine. There were three conferences, one of which was in led by Rafael Caro Repetto, a doctoral researcher with the MTG at UPF, “How music technology helps me understand the music of the Jingju”.
The meeting sought to become a showcase for the breadth of topics and approaches to music research that receive the support of the European Commission’s most prestigious funding programme. The programme of the European Research Music Conference included presentations, demonstrations, short communications, concerts and other parallel activities.
Detailed programme of the conference here