Abstract: Although MIR did arguably not start as a research discipline for promoting creativity and music performance, this trend has begun to gain importance in recent years. The possibilities of MIR for supporting musical creation and musical education are indeed many-folded. While the use of MIR techniques for real-time music creation may indeed help both experts and complete novices to explore new creative musical universes laying somewhere in between micro-level synthesis control and macro-level remixing, the application of MIR tools oriented to music education and to children’s musical performance seems another unexplored area with radical new possibilities. In this talk we will describe some recent applications of MIR techniques to music and multimodal creation recently developed at the MTG and at Reactable Systems, and we will explore the potential of MIR for children music education and performance.

Bio: Sergi Jordà (1961) holds a B.S. in Fundamental Physics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communication. He is a researcher in the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he specializes in real-time interaction and tabletop interfaces, and an Associate Professor in the same university, where he teaches computer music, HCI, and interactive media arts. He has written many articles, books, given workshops and lectured though Europe, Asia and America, always trying to bridge HCI, music performance and interactive media arts. He has received several international awards, including the prestigious Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica in 2008. He is currently best known as one of the inventors of the Reactable, a tabletop musical instrument that in 2007 accomplished mass popularity after being integrated in Icelandic artist Bjork’s Volta world Tour. He is also one of the founding partners of Reactable Systems, a spin-off company created in 2009 (www.reactable.com).