The European Research Council has awarded Xavier Serra a Proof of Concept grant to complement the existing ERC Advanced Grant on the CompMusic project. This new project will be dedicated to promote the exploitation of a number of technologies that can support on-line music education.

 

The TECSOME project will develop an exploitable system to facilitate the assessment of the music exercises submitted by music students taking on-line courses. The system will integrate technologies developed within the CompMusic project that measure the similarity between musical audio recordings, and with it, there will be an effort to define a market strategy to exploit it. The goal is to develop an approach with which to scale up music performance courses to MOOC level.

 

Proof of Concept grants, worth €150,000 each and open to ERC grant holders, can be used to establish intellectual property rights, investigate business opportunities or conduct technical validation. Xavier Serra already got a Proof of Concept grant in 2015, CAMUT, in that case, to exploit other CompMusic results for the particular case of Indian music. 

 

The CompMusic project, funded with an Advanced grant of the ERC in 2010 will finish in June 2017. In this project a group of researchers led by Xavier Serra have worked on the automatic description of music by emphasizing cultural specificity, carrying research within the field of music information processing with a domain knowledge approach. They have developed information modelling techniques of relevance to several non-Western music cultures, contributing to the overall field of Music Information Retrieval and of relevance to music exploration and education. TECSOME is a natural step in the technology transfer goals of the CompMusic project.