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Xavier Serra (born September 10, 1959) is a researcher in the field of Sound and Music Computing and professor at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona. He is the founder and director of the Music Technology Group at the UPF.
Xavier Serra was born in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) and from a very young age he maintained a dual interest in music and science. He started musical studies when he was 11 years old, studying classical guitar and cello at the Conservatory of Barcelona (graduated in guitar in 1981) and then he combined those studies with the studies of Biology at the University of Barcelona (BSc in Biology in 1981).
After completing his undergraduate education and with a scholarship from a Catalan bank, he continued his studies in the USA. He did a Master in Music at Florida State University (graduated with honours in 1983), where he was able to combine music performance with a formal education in computer music in one of the few centres that at that time offered this possibility. In 1983 he obtained a Fulbright scholarship to do a PhD and was accepted at Stanford University to work at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), specializing in audio signal processing for music applications. At CCRMA, he studied with pioneers in the field like John Chowning, Max Mathews and Julius Smith. Xavier Serra obtained his PhD in 1989 with a thesis entitled: A System for Sound Analysis/Transformation/Synthesis based on a Deterministic plus Stochastic Decomposition. Out of the thesis, Stanford University obtained a patent and a number of relevant academic articles were published. Serra's thesis was recognized as an important contribution to the field of Sound and Music Computing, being cited by several hundred academic publications in the next few years and obtaining wide recognition from the research community.
After obtaining the PhD, Xavier Serra was hired by the Japanese company Yamaha at a research centre that the company established in California, Yamaha Music Technologies. There he continued for two years his research on audio processing applied to sound synthesis, working especially with the singing voice.
In 1991 Xavier Serra obtained a grant from the Spanish Government to return to Barcelona with the goal to promote there the field of Sound and Music Computing. He became the executive director of Phonos Foundation and from that position, he promoted new education and research initiatives. He joined the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 1994 and established the Music Technology Group. He also helped in creating the Escola Superior de Music de Catalunya, where he established the Department of Sonology.
As head of the Music Technology Group of the UPF, Xavier Serra has been behind most of the accomplishments of the group, such as Vocaloid, Freesound.org, BMAT, and Reactable. He has also been very active in promoting initiatives in the field of Sound and Music Computing at the international level, being editor and reviewer of a number of journals, conferences and research programs of the European Commission, and giving lectures on current and future challenges of the field.
In 2010 Xavier Serra was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to carry out the project CompMusic (Computational models for the discovery of the world's music). 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 North-India (Hindustani) South-India (Carnatic), Turkey (Ottoman), Maghreb (Andalusian) and China (Beijing Opera). CompMusic wants to challenge the current western centred information paradigms, advance our Information Technologies research, and contribute to our rich multicultural society.
The Institute for Catalan Studies, also known by the acronym IEC, is an academic institution which seeks to undertake research and study into "all elements of Catalan culture". It is based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Pompeu Fabra University is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia in Spain. The university was created by the Autonomous Government of Catalonia in 1990 and was named after Pompeu Fabra. It is highly competitive in research and has as its goal the transformation of education to meet the challenges of the future. UPF has been ranked the best university in Spain since 2015 and 16th best young university in the world in 2022 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Language technology, often called human language technology (HLT), studies methods of how computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. Working with language technology often requires broad knowledge not only about linguistics but also about computer science. It consists of natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL) on the one hand, many application oriented aspects of these, and more low-level aspects such as encoding and speech technology on the other hand.
The Barcelona Biomedical Research Park ("PRBB") is an agglomeration of six public research centres and is located alongside the Hospital del Mar de Barcelona. The PRBB is the product of an initiative launched by the Government of Catalonia, the City Council of Barcelona and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which aims to promote research and collaboration between closely related fields. Each centre works independently in its own field and a management group, the PRBB Consortium, is responsible for managing the building and facilities, in addition to coordinating joint scientific research activities among the various centres. About 1,400 people are employed in the PRBB, making it one of the largest biomedical research clusters in the south of Europe. The centre was opened in May 2006.
Jordi Camí is Professor of Pharmacology at Pompeu Fabra University, General Director of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), and vice president of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.
Institut Universitari de Cultura, also known by the acronym IUC, is a school belonging to Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona. It was created in 1994 in order to promote interdisciplinary cultural research in the fields of art, philosophy and literature. It's directed by Rafael Argullol. IUC includes the university's Seminar of Slavic Studies, the Seminar of History of Religions, and the Prehistoric Art Research Centre, as well as a number of Humanities postgraduate and doctorate programs. It's closely associated with the Biblioteca Mystica et Philosophica Alois M. Haas, hosted in the Ciutadella Campus of UPF.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
Sergi Jordà is a Catalan innovator, installation artist, digital musician and Associate Professor at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is best known for directing the team that invented the Reactable. He is also a trained Physicist.
Harmonic pitch class profiles (HPCP) is a group of features that a computer program extracts from an audio signal, based on a pitch class profile—a descriptor proposed in the context of a chord recognition system. HPCP are an enhanced pitch distribution feature that are sequences of feature vectors that, to a certain extent, describe tonality, measuring the relative intensity of each of the 12 pitch classes of the equal-tempered scale within an analysis frame. Often, the twelve pitch spelling attributes are also referred to as chroma and the HPCP features are closely related to what is called chroma features or chromagrams.
Sound and music computing (SMC) is a research field that studies the whole sound and music communication chain from a multidisciplinary point of view. By combining scientific, technological and artistic methodologies it aims at understanding, modeling and generating sound and music through computational approaches.
The Music Technology Group (MTG) is a research group of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. It was founded in 1994 by Xavier Serra, and it specializes in sound and music computing research.
The Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Conference is the forum for international exchanges around the core interdisciplinary topics of Sound and Music Computing. The conference is held annually to facilitate the exchange of ideas in this field.
The Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) is an interuniversity research institute and postgraduate education center located in Barcelona, established in 2004 as a joint initiative between the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs and five universities in the Barcelona metropolitan area, as a center of excellence in international studies. The President of the Institute is Narcís Serra, former Minister of Defense and former Vice President of Spain, and the Director is Jacint Jordana, Professor of Political Science at the Pompeu Fabra University.
ELISAVA is the first school of design, an internationally oriented educational and research institution affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University The school is situated in Barcelona and is home to around 2,200 students and more than 800 teachers.
Enric Ucelay-Da Cal is a historian specializing in contemporary history, who has done extensive work on Catalan history. He is at present (2014) Senior Professor Emeritus at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona and coordinator of a Research Group on States, Nations and Sovereignties, linked to the UPF.
Núria López Bigas is a Spanish biologist and research professor with expertise in medical genetics, computational biology, and bioinformatics. She is an ICREA professor at Pompeu Fabra University and she also leads the Biomedical Genomics Research Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain. Her research is focused on developing computational approaches to investigate cancer genomes.
María Paz Battaner Arias is a Spanish philologist and lexicographer. Since 29 January 2017 member of Spanish Royal Academy. She was elected on December 3, 2015, to fill the chair s, vacant since the death in 2013 of José Luis Pinillos Díaz. She has directed and published several dictionaries and carried out numerous works on the didactics of the language. Her main lines of research are lexicology and lexicography, 19th century political language, specialised language and the didactics of the Spanish language.
Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.
The Institute of Evolutionary Biology (In Spanish Instituto de Biología Evolutiva IBE is a joint research center of Pompeu Fabra University and the Spanish National Research Council founded in 2008. IBE is the only research center in Catalonia and the rest of Spain that is entirely dedicated to evolutionary biology and natural resources.
Ricard Zapata-Barrero is a scholar of migration studies, specializing in migration governance, citizenship, and diversity. He is a full professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and the director of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration (GRITIM-UPF).
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