ICREA Academia
Xavier Serra Casals

Xavier Serra Casals

ICREA Acadèmia 2008, 2013 & 2019

Universitat Pompeu Fabra · Engineering Sciences

Xavier Serra Casals

Professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies and Director of the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He obtained a PhD from Stanford University in 1989 with a dissertation on the spectral processing of musical sounds that is considered a key reference in the field. 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. He was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to carry out the project CompMusic aimed at promoting multicultural approaches in music information research.


Research interests

All my research of the past five years has been carried out within my research lab, the Audio Signal Processing Lab of the MTG, where we focus on the understanding of sound and music signals by combining signal processing and machine learning methods with semantic technologies. We work both on data-driven methodologies, in which the development and use of large data collections is a fundamental aspect, and on knowledge-driven approaches, in which domain knowledge of the problem to be addressed is needed. Combining these research approaches, we have been able to tackle practical problems related to music exploration and recommendation, classification of sounds, and automatic assessment for music education. We have been able to combine a very strong open science strategy with successful technology transfer initiatives.


Keywords

sound and music computing, audio signal processing, music information retrieval, machine learning