Université de Strasbourg

Moreno Andreatta

Biography

Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), CNRS UMR 9912 – Science and Technology of Music and Sound (STMS), University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris, France & USIAS Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research (IRMA), University of Strasbourg

Moreno Andreatta, USIAS Fellow 2017

Moreno Andreatta holds diplomas in mathematics from the University of Pavia, piano performance from the Novara Conservatory and computational musicology from the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris where he obtained his PhD in 2003 with a thesis devoted to algebraic methods in 20th century music and musicology. A former recipient of a European Scholarship of the Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet Foundation (in 2000), he is a founding member of the Journal of Mathematics and Music (Taylor & Francis) and vice-president of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (depuis 2007). Co-editor of the "Musique/Sciences" (IRCAM/Delatour) and "Computational Music Sciences" (Springer), he is CNRS Director of research on mathematics and music at IRCAM within the Music Representations Team where he conducts research on the links between music and mathematics from the perspective of contemporary art music as well as popular music (including rock, pop, jazz and chanson). He has written more than fifty songs in different languages, principally based on texts by poets such as Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, Virginia Woolf, Wystan Hugh Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Guido Gozzano, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Henri Pichette, François Minod, Antonia Soulez, Salah Al Hamdani and Leonardo Mello. He teaches "Formal Models in Popular Music" within the undergraduate program on popular music of the University of Bordeaux 3 as well as "Mathematical Models in Computational Musicology" within the ATIAM (Acoustique, traitement du signal et informatique appliqués à la musique) programme of the UPMC University that he currently coordinates. At present Moreno Andreatta is invited researcher at IRMA (Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research) of the University of Strasbourg.

Project - Structural Music Information Research (SMIR): introducing algebra, topology and category theory into computational musicology

May 2017 - September 2019

Despite a long historical relationship between mathematics and music, the interest of mathematicians is a recent phenomenon. In contrast to statistical methods and signal-based approaches currently employed in Music Information Research, the SMIR project stresses the necessity of introducing a structural multidisciplinary approach into computational musicology making use of advanced mathematics. The project is based on the interplay between three main mathematical disciplines: algebra, topology and category theory. It therefore opens promising perspectives on important prevailing challenges, such as the automatic classification of musical styles or the solution of open mathematical conjectures, asking for new collaborations between mathematicians, computer scientists, musicologists, and composers.

The SMIR project also differs from traditional applications of mathematics to music in aiming to build bridges between different musical genres, ranging from contemporary art music to popular music, including rock, pop, jazz and chanson. It aims to create a unique research environment at the University of Strasbourg where mathematicians will collaborate with computer scientists, musicologists and composers. New structural mathematical methods based on algebra, topology and category theory are proposed in order to reveal musical properties, thus opening strategic research directions in computational musicology via a genuinely multidisciplinary approach. They will be integrated into a unique pedagogical software tool strongly reinforcing the scientific and pedagogical outreach. If mathematics has largely shown its power and generality in music theory and analysis, the SMIR project claims that the opposite also holds. Music can occupy a strategic place in the development of mathematics since music-theoretical constructions can be used to solve open mathematical problems.

The SMIR project will also contribute to the emergence of a new structural approach in the field of Music Information Research based on the interplay between different mathematical disciplines such as algebra, topology and category theory. It proposes to approach the computational aspects of musical processes in a unifying way by removing the boundaries between different genres and by paying equal attention to contemporary art music and popular music. The development of ad-hoc computer-aided environments is a necessary condition to enable the systematic comparison between theoretical constructions and computational models. This will not only open new forms of collaborations between mathematicians, computer scientists, musicologists and composers, but will also provide an important contribution to the emergence of new pedagogical approaches in “mathemusical” research which will help to spread this interdisciplinary research outside of the circle of specialists.

Post-doc biography - Corentin Guichaoua

Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research (IRMA), University of Strasbourg

Corentin Guchaoua

Corentin Guichaoua holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Rennes 1. His thesis, which was defended in September 2017 under the supervision of Frédéric Bimbot, focused on compressed descriptions of chord sequences from pieces of music using formal models, in order to extract information on their structure.

Since then, he has taken up a postdoc position at the University of Strasbourg within the SMIR project. His current work is on the implementation of algebraic and topologic methods for a systematic analysis and comparison of pieces of music, as well as the automatic determination of which angles of analysis are most relevant for a particular piece, or pieces.

 

Post-doc biography - José-Luis Besada

Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research (IRMA), University of Strasbourg

Corentin Guchaoua

José-Luis Besada studied composition at the Madrid Royal Conservatory and mathematics at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), in Spain. He obtained a PhD in musicology at both Paris 8 University and the UCM. He carried out a first post-doc at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) and is currently a post-doc researcher at the University of Strasbourg.

He has taught contemporary music analysis at Paris 8 University and at Paris-Sorbonne University, and a number of Spanish universities invite him periodically for specific seminars on music theory and analysis. José-Luis Besada’s main publication is the book Metamodels in Compositional Practices, The case of Alberto Posadas's Liturgia Fractal (Éditions Ircam-Centre Pompidou / Delatour France), in which he explores the cognitive and formal issues conditioning the way a composer takes advantage of mathematical models for writing music. He is also guest editor, with Dan Albertson, of a double special issue on Spanish contemporary music that will appear soon at Contemporary Music Review. Moreover, he currently collaborates with the National Radio of Spain - Radio Clásica, conducting the weekly broadcast on contemporary music.

Links

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