The soundscapes of Barcelona

Sound and Music Computing Summer School, July 17-20, 2010.
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
http://smcnetwork.org/summer_school/barcelona2010
Contact: Please, fill this form.

The SMC Conference is the forum for international exchanges around the core interdisciplinary topics of Sound and Music Computing. Prior to the Conference there will be the SMC Summer School.

The goal of this Summer School is to give an opportunity to young researchers interested in the field to learn about some of the core interdisciplinary topics and to share their own experiences with other young researchers, through the study of the soundscapes of Barcelona. For that, we will use Freesound.org, a huge collaborative database of sounds, released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license.

The creation and study of the soundscape of Barcelona will be divided into different subtopics, covering all the required aesthetic and technical aspects for soundscape analysis and creation. For that, the program of the summer school is divided into lectures and hand-on practical sessions. 

The School caters to suit different student backgrounds and interests. If your background is an Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Music, Art, Sound recording, Design, etc., there is something new for you to learn at this Summer School.

Index

• Academic program (Schedule, Course material)
• Team (Coordination, Teachers, Tutors for the hands-on practical sessions)
• Application (Important dates, Registration forms, Fees)
• Travelling and Accomodation (Location, How to arrive, Accomodation)

Academic program

The four days program includes lectures and hands-on practical sessions. The 3 main lectures cover the following topics:

• Soundscape composition: Aesthetic and conceptual aspects for soundscape creation, by Barry Truax (See Teachers section).
• Sound analysis and description: Automatic tools to describe audio according to different musical facets, by Perfecto Herrera and Emilia Gómez (See Teachers section).
• Sound recording: Tips and tricks to record and mix audio in optimal conditions, by José Lozano (See Teachers section).

The hands-on practical sessions cover the following topics:

• SMC Tales: The goal of the 'SMC tales' workshop is to develop a mobile phone application for collaborative story telling. The phone will be used during the conference to extract from the visitors a story that they create together. The story is formed by adding a recording of a single sentence at a time. But before the story can be extended, the story teller is presented with the last five recordings in the story. They can then choose to advance the story in whatever way they want. After the new storyteller has recorded a sentence, he can transform his voice to a robot, a kid, an old woman, and other types of voices. When satisfied with the result, the recording, together with a picture of the storyteller, gps data, possibly any subjective annotations, is uploaded to a server. The resulting story can then be listened to by visiting the 'SMC tales' website. Not only is the story represented in sound, but the story can be 'experienced' by clicking the storytellers' pictures, the annotations that were given, the voice transformations that were applied, other audio analysis, or by displaying where the parts of the story were recorded on a map. By having all these different ways of viewing what is normally a simple recording, we can give visitors of the website a peek inside the creative process, how the story was formed. We can give the story's 'readers' more insight and hopefully a more fun experience, by showing the context in which the storytellers made their creative decisions. The parts of the application that will be developed by the students during the workshop are the graphical representations. All audio analysis and processing will be done by interacting with the MTG web services and the necesary data for the visualizations will be retrieved from them as well. The workshop will familiarize the students with the use of MTG's web service offerings and the reason behind implementing technology this way.
• Recording+Soudscapes: Focusing on soundscape creation, by expert tutors (See Tutors section). The recordings for this topic will be held in a acoustically interesting environment, such as the Cathedral, Santa Maria del Mar, etc.
• Tangilble interface for graph based music representation: The purpose of this workshop is to build a tangible interface for the music representation used in radio freesound (http://radio.freesound.org). In radio freesound, a music composition is represented by a graph where nodes represent sounds, and edges represent transitions between sounds. This representation is aimed at collaborative composition based on a shared repository of sounds (freesound). Collaborative work, on the other hand, is one of the main applications of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). By representing sounds of the database as tangible objects, users will be able to discuss, manipulate and exchange compositions without the restrictions of a single-user computer interface. An example of this approach is tangible sequencer (http://www.tangiblesequencer.com/). Before the workshop, participants will have recorded, edited, labelled and uploaded their sounds to freesound. These sounds will be used to develop and test the interface.
• Recording+Processing: Focusing on integrating the recording into the Reactable platform, by expert tutors (See Tutors section). The recordings for this topic will be held in a specific environment according to the goals of the specific projects.

Schedule

The project presentations take place on Wed. 21st in the Auditorium, according to the following schedule:

Course material

• Lectures:
  • Soundscape composition: TBA
  • Sound analysis and description: TBA
  • Sound recording: TBA
• Projects:
  • Recording+Description: TBA
  • Recording+Soundscapes: TBA
  • Recording+Augmented: TBA
  • Recording+Processing: TBA

Team

Coordination

• SMC Conference chair: Xavier Serra
• Summer school chair: Enric Guaus

Teachers

The faculty for the lecture sessions is:

• Soundscape Composition: Barry Truax
• Sound and Music Description: Perfecto Herrera and Emilia Gómez
• Audio Recording: José Lozano

Tutors for the hands-on practical sessions

The tutors for the practical sessions are: 

• Vincent Akkermans is a system architect for personalized access to multimedia and supporting creativity. Vincent recently graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts, obtaining a master's degree in sound and music technology. Throughout his study, Vincent focused on the design of systems that create music or aid in the process. During internships and workshops at the Patchingzone, STEIM, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, he developed a broad perspective encompassing the fields of algorithmic composition, game audio, generative art, software architecture, game design, music information retrieval, interaction design, accessibility, knowledge engineering, and physical computing.Currently, Vincent works on the Music 3.0 project at the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Music 3.0's main goal is to develop an experimental web-based system for music creation, interaction and socialization. It integrates the most recent technologies of the Web 2.0, advanced on-line tools for music creation, and large sound and music repositories.
• Stefan Kersten (http://mtg.upf.edu/people/skersten) is a researcher and sound artist living and working in Barcelona. His research at the Music Technology Group focuses on sound texture modeling for analysis and synthesis and automated soundscape generation techniques. In his work with the DissoNoiSex collective (http://dissonoisex.org/), he explores the fringes of human interaction in interactive sound and video installations. He is an expert SuperCollider user, and has taught signal processing techniques in various workshops around the world.
• Gerard Roma got involved in programming computers while searching for new sounds and musical tools. He is currently a researcher and Phd Candidate at MTG-UPF. His work focuses on computational models and techniques for collaborative music creation.
• Mattia Schirosa (Fano, 1983, IT), is an Interaction Sound Design Researcher working at the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He obtained the Cinema and Multimedia Engineer Master Degree in Turin, IT, in January 2009. He worked in several augmented reality productions for theatre (Konic, Marcel.lì, Multimedia Reality Park, Turin) and Music Technology research Lab (Open University Computer Music department, Milton Keynes, UK) as interactive sound synthesis developer; he worked in Media production (RAI, Short Films) as sound designer and video editor. He is also a musician and traditional instruments researcher. In the last years his interests focus on Soundscape exploration/composition and Acoustic Ecology research. He worked on the development of a software application written in SuperCollider language that allows soundscape resynthesis. He did soundscape surveys, recordings and simulation experiments: Porta Palazzo Marketplace in Turin presented at the Biennale of Contemporary Music in Venice, IT, and the Canary Island Virtual Travel inside an MTG project for sonifying virtual world.

Application

Important dates

• Deadline for applications: Friday 30 April 2010
• Notification of acceptance: Monday 17 May 2010
• Deadline for Student's project submission: Friday 2 July 2010

Registration forms

Applications must include the following documents in pdf format:

• Curriculum vitae (max. 1 page)
• Proof of university enrollment.
• Short description of the student research interest and motivation to participate (max. 2 pages)

Fees

There is a student registration fee of 150 Euros to the Summer School. This fee covers coffee breaks and course material. This fee does NOT cover costs for meals. 

Travelling and Accomodation

Location

The SMC Conference and the Summer School take place at the Communication Campus of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

More information at the SMC Conference - Location web page.

How to arrive

To reach the Communication-Poblenou campus we recommend the public transport:

• Subway: L1 - Glòries
• Bus: 7, 92, 192, N7
• Tram: T4 - Ca l'Aranyó

More information at the SMC Conference - How to arrive web page.

Accomodation

There is a large list of hotels, residences and apartments near the campus. Please, go to the SMC Conference - Accomodation web page.