The Music Technology Group (MTG) is a research group of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. It was founded in 1994 by its current director, Xavier Serra

Xavier Serra

Xavier Serra is a researcher in the field of Sound and Music Computing and professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the founder and director of the Music Technology Group at the UPF.-Life and Education:...

, and it specializes in sound and music computing

Sound and music computing

Sound and Music Computing is a research field that studies the whole sound and music communication chain from a multidisciplinary point of view...

 research.

Ongoing research

The research of the MTG is quite close to the core of the Sound and Music Computing interdisciplinariety; combining strengths in basic disciplines, such as Signal Processing

Signal processing

Signal processing is an area of systems engineering, electrical engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of signals, in either discrete or continuous time...

, Machine Learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

 and Human Computer Interaction while being able to apply other disciplines/technologies in order to approach music related application-driven problems. Current active topics include:

• Audio signal processing: focusing on spectral modeling for sound synthesis and transformations.
• Sound and Music description: focusing on semantic analysis and classification of audio signals.
• Musical and Advanced Interaction: focusing on table-top interfaces for musical creation and exploration.
• Sound and Music communities: focusing on social networking technologies for sound and music applications.

Educational activities

The MTG is very active in educational activities within the UPF and in collaboration with the ESMUC. Here is a list of the main academic degrees in which the researchers of the MTG are involved with

• PhD in Sound and Music Computing at the UPF
• Master in Sound and Music Computing at the UPF
• Postgraduate program in Sonology , collaboration between UPF and ESMUC
• Bachelor's degree in Audiovisual Systems at the UPF
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering at the UPF
• Bachelor's degree in Sonology at the ESMUC

Knowledge transfer

Apart from the standard academic results in the form of academic publications and teaching, one of the major aims of the MTG is to promote technology transfer. To that aim the MTG collaborates with companies like Yamaha

Yamaha

Yamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...

 or Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...

 to develop new technologies, it promotes artistic productions through the Phonos Foundation, it has created two spin-off companies to commercialize some of the developed technologies, BMAT and Reactable Systems , and it has developed and maintains technologies that are available online for anyone, like Freesound.org or Canoris . Some of the developed technologies have had a big impact, like Vocaloid

Vocaloid

is a singing synthesizer application, with its signal processing part developed through a joint research project between the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Japan's Yamaha Corporation, who backed the development financially—and later developed the software into the commercial product...

, Reactable

Reactable

The Reactable is an electronic musical instrument with a tabletop Tangible User Interface that has been developed within the at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain by Sergi Jordà, Marcos Alonso, Martin Kaltenbrunner and Günter Geiger....

 or Freesound.

Relevant current projects

Of the current research project being carried out at the MTG it is worth mentioning:

• CompMusic (Computational models for the discovery of the world's music): CompMusic is a research project funded by the European Research Council
  European Research Council
  The European Research Council is the independent body that funds investigator-driven frontier research in the European Union . It is part of the Seventh Research Framework Programme ....
  
  . The main goal of CompMusic is to advance in the field of Music Computing by approaching a number of the current research challenges from a multicultural perspective. It aims to advance in the description and formalization of music, making it more accessible to computational approaches and reducing the gap between audio signal descriptions and semantically meaningful music concepts. It intends to develop information modelling techniques applicable to non-western music repertories and formulate computational models to represent culture specific music contexts. CompMusic approaches these research challenges by (1) combining methodologies from disciplines such as Information Processing, Computational Musicology, Music Cognition and Human-Computer Interaction, and (2) analyzing a variety of music information sources such as audio features, symbolic scores, text commentaries, user evaluations, etc… from some of the major non-western art-music traditions in India (Hindustani, Carnatic), Turkey (Ottoman), Arab countries (Andalusian) and China (Han). CompMusic wants to challenge the current western centered information paradigms, advance our Information Technologies research, and contribute to our rich multicultural society.

• SIEMPRE (Social Interaction and Entrainment using Music PeRformancE): This project aims at developing new theoretical frameworks, computational methods and algorithms for the analysis of ensemble musical performances. MTG's tasks in the project are devoted to the acquisition, analysis and modeling of the bowed-string performance gestures involved in sound production mechanisms, especially bowing gestures. SIEMPRE is funded by the EU under the FET program and it is coordinated by the University of Genova.

• Freesound.org: This is a collaborative site to share sounds developed and maintained at the MTG. A number of research projects at the MTG are dedicated to improve the technologies behind the site and to understand the behavior of the community that is using and supporting it. This project is funded through a number of EU projects and with the support of Google
  Google
  Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
  
  .

• Music 3.0: Project that aims at developing 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. As part of this project the MTG has developed Canoris, a set of web services for the creation and analysis of sound and music. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Turism and Trade.