Seminar by Xavier Serra on CompMusic
Seminar by Xavier Serra on CompMusic
On thursday, February 3rd at 15:30h in room 52.321 Xavier Serra will give a lecture on "CompMusic: Computational models for the discovery of the world's music", a new project funded with an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council.
Abstract: Current IT research does not respond to the world's multi-cultural
reality. It could be argued that we are imposing the paradigms of our
market-driven western culture also on IT and that current IT research
results will only facilitate the access of a small part of the world’s
information to a small part of the world's population. Most IT research
is being carried out with a western centred approach and as a result,
our data models, cognition models, user models, interaction models,
ontologies, … are all culturally biased. This fact is quite evident in
music information research, since, despite the world's richness in
musical cultures, most of the research is centred on CDs and metadata of
our western commercial music. CompMusic wants to break this huge
research bias. By approaching musical information modelling from a
multicultural perspective it aims at advancing our state of the art
while facilitating the discovery and reuse of the music produced outside
the western commercial context. But the development of computational
models to address the world’s music information richness cannot be done
from the West looking out; we have to involve researchers and musical
experts immersed in the different cultures. Their contribution is
fundamental to develop the appropriate multicultural musicological and
cognitive frameworks from which we should then carry our research on
finding appropriate musical features, ontologies, data representations,
user interfaces and user centred approaches. CompMusic will investigate
some of the most consolidated non-western classical music traditions,
Indian (hindustani, carnatic), Turkish-Arab (ottoman, andalusian), and
Chinese (han), developing the needed computational models to bring their
music into the current globalized information framework. Using these
music cultures as case studies, cultures that are alive and have a
strong influence in current society, we can develop rich information
models that can take advantage of the existing information coming from
musicological and cultural studies, from mature performance practice
traditions and from active social contexts. With this approach we aim at
challenging the current western centred information paradigms, advance
our IT research, and contribute to our rich multicultural society.