- Jaume Parera

Student: Master in Sound and Music Computing

 June 8th , 2016 

Brief Thesis Description about the prize and your work: 

The thesis project that I am developing aims to discover how to improve the systems of automatic mix of songs: therefore, how to imitate the functions of the Disc Jockey automatically. This includes both the mix itself and choosing which song goes after each, and so being able to create a session with as much “humanity” as possible. It is a project related to GiantSteps and in which both Perfecto Herrera and Sergi Jordà, as supervisors, have provided me with all the necessary support. Moreover, the team of the Microfusa school in Barcelona have cooperated with the project by helping me get in touch directly with professionals from the DJ world.

Closely related to this project, there arose the possibility of presenting the system, and being able to make an evaluation of it, at the contest AlgoRhythms, proposed by the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, with the cooperation of the Digital Music and Sonic Arts program at Dartmouth. Therefore, along with my partner Pritish Chadna, we developed the automatic mix algorithm which created a session of 15 minutes from an initial song and a selection of 1000 songs. Finally our “automatic DJ” has become first in the classification, sharing podium with another system and with an ex-member of the MTG, Gerard Romà, in second position. We are very happy with the result and the support received to develop it, as well as the possibility of having been able to represent positively the Master (SMC) that we are taking, and the MTG team.

 

Experience as a Master Student:

I think that this master offers a direct path to any field related both to research and development at company level of sound and music technologies. The work during the year is intense; you touch on many of the threads of the State of the Art in the field, each of them with an infinite potentiality of development which opens paths to continue working, specializing or to be prepared for any situation. It is a very gratifying training, discovering and seeing the impact of the projects, or even modelling the future of the sound theories is the driving force of this master.