Sónar is Barcelona's international festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art, and is a leader in the field of music and electronic culture. It is being held for the twenty-fourth time this year, from 14 to 16 June at Barcelona's Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) has signed a collaboration agreement with the Sónar festival to promote activities fostering the integration of creativity, research, new technological media and culture in the field of music.

With this in mind, Sónar and the Music Technology Research Group (MTG) have been responsible for several initiatives, including the third Music Hack Day in Barcelona organized by the MTG - and the second organized as part of Sónar - which will take place over the three days of the festival , a round table discussion on the future of music technologies in the context of the European project Mires, and the organization of an exhibition featuring research and innovation projects related to various courses taught at the university: the UPF master's programme exhibition.

Five interactive ideas incorporating music and images

A new feature of the 24th festival is the exhibition of the master's degree projects at SonarPro, to highlight the projects undertaken on the Sound & Music Computing master's degree by the MTG, a group that is a member of the TECNIO network of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF and the Digital Arts network of IDEC-UPF, as well as the work done as a result of the creative output scholarships awarded by the Phonos Foundation.

The exhibition of the master's degree projects produced at UPF consists of five exhibited projects with a common interactive installation format that also incorporate music as a central feature:

Gengen, developed by Daniel González Franco, Javier Guajardo and Rocío Márquez - a musical installation featuring sound and images, which captures movement and transforms it into music and images. The movements are captured by sensors that turn the information into sound and pictures, and these are projected on a screen.

Prefall135, developed by Katerina Antonopoulou, Rodrigo Carvalho and Javier Chavarri. This is an audiovisual installation which uses water energy to generate and process images and audio. The person interacting with the installation can control the flow using a set of taps, creating their own visual and musical composition.

6DOS - Six Degrees Of Sound, a project by Daniel González Franco, is an ingenious interactive binaural audio playback system which changes the sound depending on the listener's position. A camera detects the position of the person interacting with the installation, and depending on their movement around the room, they can hear music from different perspectives, so that the person can "walk through the music."

The EyeHarp by Zacharias Vamvakousis: a musical instrument that uses software to generate sound by tracking the movements of the human eye, so that the viewer's gaze controls the musical output. The project could possibly have an application for people with motor disabilities.

U-Beat, developed by Giampaolo Costagliola, is an application for mobile devices that interprets the user's gestures while running or dancing, and creates music based on these.

The exhibition is open to the public on floor -1 of the CCCB as part of the SonarPro section of the Sónar Festival from 14 to 16 June 2012, from 12 noon to 8 pm. More information at: www.sonar.es.