INESC Porto offers musical summer in Porto
INESC Porto organised the Sonic Interaction Design Summer School and the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference, which took place at the Casa da Música concert hall, between 18 and 25 July. Presided and organised by Fabien Gouyon, collaborator at the Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), the organisation committee also included CITAR - Research Center For Science and Technology in Art of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the School of Music and Performing Arts of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), and the Casa da Música.
01st September 2009
Under the theme sound and music computing, one of INESC Porto’s areas of expertise, the Summer School and the Conference constituted the two summer proposals for music technology aficionados, providing participants with a set of concerts and keynote speeches, among other activities.
“Sounds of Porto” was the theme chosen for the Sonic Interaction Design Summer School, which took place between 18 and 21 July at Casa da Música’s Digotopia area. This was a European initiative whose aim was to represent the city of Porto through sounds. Here, throughout four days, 21 Higher Education students (selected from a total of 52 applicants) interested in Sound Art had the opportunity to learn from senior researchers how to communicate, convey emotions or to make art and scientific research with the sounds of Porto. The choice of articles and music pieces was a difficult and selective process, with less than one third of the applicants being selected.
Other than the training component provided by 11 senior researchers who gave lectures, the young researches were encouraged to show their ideas and share their knowledge through Freesound.org, a social network where it is possible to edit, categorize and share sound contents.
Organised for the first time in Portugal and the first of its kind in the country, the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference constituted a privileged forum in Europe for the promotion of ideas and experience exchange in the context of Sound and Music Computing, an interdisciplinary field that combines scientific, technological and artistic methodologies in order to understand, model and generate sound and music through computational approaches.
The Conference started with a network performance, a concert where musicians scattered around the world and connected through the most recent ICTs were challenged to create and improvise music. With more than 250 participants, this concert was followed in real time by hundreds of people from all over the world over the internet.
The conference also included presentations of some of the most important experts in the area, such as the presentation of the renowned Portuguese scientist, José Carlos Príncipe, who discussed the theme "Perception as Self Organization in Space Time", and the American Atau Tanaka, who discussed the theme "From Mainframes to DIY Culture - Continuous Evolution in Computer Music”.
After previous editions in Paris, Salerno, Marseille, Lefkada and Berlin, the Conference that INESC Porto brought to Portugal for the first time was considered a success, having welcomed the most important researchers in the world in the area of sound and music computing, as well as over 200 participants from different areas from different places in the world, such as South and North America, Asia, Australia, and others.
BIP July 2009