Music is a universal phenomenon that manifests itself in every cultural context with a particular personality and the technologies supporting music have to take into account the specificities that every musical culture might have. This is particularly evident in the field of Music Information Retrieval, in which we aim at developing technologies to analyse, describe and explore any type of music.
From this perspective we started the project CompMusic (http://compmusic.upf.edu) in which we focus on a number of MIR problems through the study of five music cultures: Hindustani (North India), Carnatic (South India), Turkish-makam (Turkey), Arab-Andalusian (Maghreb), and Beijing Opera (China). We work on the extraction of musically relevant features from audio music recordings related to melody and rhythm, and on the semantic analysis of the contextual information of those recordings.

In this talk I will do an overview of CompMusic and also briefly mention other research projects being carried out at the Music Technology Group of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona that relate to the analysis, description and synthesis of sound and music signals..