News and Events

The MTG launches Canoris a web service for audio analysis, audio similarity search and voice processing.

Canoris provides, through a web API, an easy access to several technologies from the MTG and its partners. It offers an environment to experiment with sound and music processing and collaborative creativity tools. In its current beta version, Canoris includes functionality for both the analysis and synthesis of sound, integrating into a single coherent platform the output of years of research in the fields of music information retrieval and digital signal processing. Over time more technology will be integrated, but for now Canoris features:

• High and low level analysis: Upload any sound file and retrieve high level descriptions like genre and mood or low level descriptions like rhythm, timbre, or key.
• Similarity Search: Put all your files in a collection and see which sound and songs are similar to each other. Search and recommendation without tagging or metadata.
• Voice Synthesis: Give Canoris text and a melody and it will sing for you.
• Voice Transform: Change a man's or woman's voice into the other sex, an old person, monster, alien, or clown.

Canoris is a platform for the collaboration between researchers, technology providers and final users. It simplifies integrating new research results and brings new functionality to interested developers more quickly. With this launch the MTG wants to explore new possibilities and uses of the technologies integrated and wants to find collaboration opportunities with interested institutions and individuals.

On Thursday October 14th 2010 at 3:30pm in room 52.321 Sergi Jordà will give a research seminar on "Tangible and Tabletop Interaction Research at the Music Technology Group".

Abstract: Sergi Jorda will present the research carried in the last years within the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in the field of tangible and tabletop interaction, in particular for the creation of new musical instruments like the Reactable. We will study and unveil the essential reasons that turn live music performance and tabletop interaction into promising and exiting fields of multidisciplinary research and experimentation.

On Wednesday October 13th 2010 at 19:30h there will be a Phonos concert at the Sala Mompou of SGAE.

Reactable Systems launches Reactable mobile, the Reactable for mobile devices. With the new application, the MTG's spin-off company brings the concept of modular tangible synthesis to mobile devices and makes it available for Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The postgraduate programme in Sonology for the academic year 2010-2011 has just started. This program is organized by IDEC and done in collaboration with ESMUC and offers a professionally oriented education in the areas of music production and on the design of new musical interfaces.

The students enrolled this year are: Carles Blanch, Borja Górriz, Nacho Yoldi, Isaac Fàbregas, Xavier Sánchez, Úrbez Capablo, Raúl Costafreda, Jordi Clemente, and Marie Tueje.

The academic year 2010-2011 of the Master in Sound and Music Computing has just started.

The students enrolled this year are: Srikanth Cherla (India), Schmele Timothy (Ireland), Heber Manuel Pérez Torres (México), Carlos Gustavo Romá (Colombia), Lina María Villa Betancourt (Colombia), Maria Panteli (Cyprus), Miron Marius (Romania), Juanjo Bosch (Spain), Alexandros Katsaprakakis (Greece),  Katerina Kosta (Greece), John  O'Connell (Ireland),  Zacharias Vamvakousis (Greece),  Jan Van Balen (Belgium), Antonio Garzón (Spain), Emilio Molina (Spain), Carles Roig Garcia (Spain), Stylianos Togias (Greece), Carlos Vaquero Patricio (Spain), Imanol Gómez (Spain), Adrian Mateo (Spain), Andres Bucci (Venezuela), Felix Tutzer (Germany), Alvaro Sarasua (Spain), Jorge García (Spain).

Jordi Bonada has been awarded a price of the Board of Trustees of the UPF dedicated to promote the knowledge transfer within the members of the university. The price is in the category of recent PhD thesis with big knowledge transfer potential. Jordi's thesis was on "Voice Processing and Synthesis by Performance Sampling and Spectral Models" and was carried out in the context of a long lasting collaboration with the company Yamaha.

Seven new PhD students are joining the MTG this academic year. Panos Papiotis, Marco Marchini, Marti Umbert, Frederic Font, Josep M. Comajuncosas, Mathieu Bosi and Sebastián Mealla have been accepted to the PhD program of the DTIC in the academic year 2010-2011 and will carry their thesis within various research projects of the MTG.