Xavier Serra (Barcelona, 1959) is Associate Professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies and Director of the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. After a multidisciplinary academic education he obtained a PhD in Computer Music from Stanford University in 1989 with a dissertation on the spectral processing of musical sounds that is considered a key reference in the field. Dr. Serra is active in promoting initiatives in the field of Sound and Music Computing at the local and international levels, being involved in the editorial board of a number of journals and conferences and giving lectures on current and future challenges of the field. In 2011 he was awarded an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council and since then he has been leading an international and interdisciplinary research team that works on music information research from a multicultural perspective.

Research interests

His research interests cover the computational analysis, description, and synthesis of sound and music signals, with a balance between basic and applied research and approaches from both scientific/technological and humanistic/artistic disciplines.  His current research emphasizes the cultural and community aspects by working on information processing techniques that aim at modeling sounds and music together with the user community that is around them. This data-driven research involves developing and combining signal-processing, machine-learning and semantic technologies methodologies, evaluating them in the context of sound and music search and discovery applications.

 

Keywords

sound and music computing, audio signal processing, music information retrieval, computational musicology