CNMAT presents Dr. Marcelo M. Wanderley, William Dawson Scholar and Professor of Music Technology at McGill University, Canada.

Interdisciplinary Research on Music, Science and Engineering: Applications to the Design of Digital Musical Instruments

Professor Wanderley will present an overview of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Music Media and Technology, CIRMMT, McGill University. With more than 40 members, 50 collaborators and 200 students, CIRMMT is a leading Canadian research centre with a focus on the intersection between music, science and technology. He will discuss the creation of a music performance analysis hub made possible by a large infrastructure grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. The hub will connect two exceptional spaces associated with CIRMMT, Université de Montréal’s Salle Claude Champagne (a 1,000 seat auditorium) and McGill’s Multimedia Room (a 7,000 m3 black box), allowing for distributed research on the performance of large ensembles.

In the second part of his talk, Professor Wanderley will focus on his research on the design and evaluation of Digital Musical Instruments (DMIs). He will discuss various aspects of the design of DMIs, including the analysis of performer gestures and the design of input devices for expert music performance. Examples of research outcomes will be presented, including the use of motion capture to accurately track performer movements and the design of fMRI-compatible musical instruments.

Marcelo M. Wanderley is William Dawson Scholar and Professor of Music Technology at McGill University, Canada. His work made early contributions to several Music Interaction topics such as the evaluation of musical interfaces, mapping and the quantification of movement in performance. He co-edited the electronic book “Trends in Gestural Control of Music”, 2000, co- authored the textbook “New Digital Musical Instruments: Control and Interaction Beyond the Keyboard”, 2006, and chaired the 2003 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2003). He was CIRMMT director from 2011 to 2014, and was recently awarded a 2016-2020 INRIA International Chair to work with the Mjolnir Team at INRIA Lille – Nord Europe.