Invited by the ThinkIT Speech Lab, Professor Xavier Serra from Spain visited IACAS on May 23. He gave a lecture titled "Music information technologies for the discovery of culture specific music repertoires" received by researchers and students in IACAS.

In his lecture, Professor Serra introduced that CompMusic was a multicultural approach to Music Computing.

The main purpose of CompMusic is to advance the field of Music Computing by approaching a number of current research challenges from a multicultural perspective.

Its objectives are to advance in the description and formalization of music, to make it more accessible to computational approaches, to reduce the gap between audio signal descriptions and semantically/culturally meaningful music concepts and to develop information modeling techniques applicable to different music repertories.

CompMusic combines several disciplines, methodologies, information sources, cultural perspectives and music repertoires. Serra chose music repertoires from Indian (hindustani, carnatic), Turkish (ottoman), Arab (andalusian) and Chinese (han).

Serra also introduced CompMusic seven tasks: music repertoires, musicological framework, music ontologies, audio description, user profiling, music interaction and music discovery.

Xavier Serra is a famous researcher in the field of Sound and Music Computing and an associate professor at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona. He is the founder and director of the Music Technology Group at the UPF.