Music for Media (music4media.org) starts moving

5 Jun 2012

New network links the University of Porto with international leaders in music and new media

m4m – Music for Media aims at creating a network of cooperation between the University of Porto and several renowned institutions worldwide: New York University (NYU), the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), Sonic Arts Research Center (SARC), the University of Manchester (NOVARS), the University of Sussex, and the Utrecht School of the Arts.

This network has as goal of putting the University of Porto in the international map in the area of music and new media, and will be focusing on the exchange of students and faculty, as well as partnerships in educational and research projects.

Through this project, the m4m team expects to develop a solid culture of excellence in the musical area and new media at the University of Porto. During 2012, distinguished faculty members from the institutions that are part of the m4m network will come to Porto to deliver a lecture about the impact of new media in music making, as well as their contributions to the current state of the art.

m4m interview at RTP Informação

The lecture series

The m4m lecture series addresses the current impact of new media in music creation and production. In the first half of the 20th century, important musicians such as Luigi Russolo, John Cage and Edgard Varèse foresaw new radical ways of making music through the use of new technologies. In the 1950s, the emergence of electronic music studios and the utilization of computers in music making helped conquering a fascinating new world of sound, and promoted radical new ways of thinking musical composition. The computer allowed composers to analyze and create sound in previously unforeseen ways, and computer-aided composition pushed the boundaries of traditional concert music. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Internet and network technologies revolutionized music distribution, and the World Wide Web became an important stage for distributed music performance enabling musicians from different points in the world to collaborate in real time. More recently, mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets have emerged as new music-making artifacts.

The second decade of the twenty-first century is thus an interesting time to assess the impact new media technologies in music making and take a peek into the future. Clarence Barlow (UCSB), Ricardo Climent (NOVARS), Sally Jane Norman (University of Sussex), Bruce Pennycook (UT Austin), Pedro Rebelo (SARC), Robert Rowe (NYU), and Hans Timmermans (HKU) will be giving fascinating lectures about the impact of new media in music making. The schedule for the lectures, their abstracts and bios of the speakers can be viewed at http://music4media.org/info/