RecerCaixa grant for the project Musical Bridges

The project Musical Bridges, to be carried out at the MTG and based on CompMusic, has received a three-year RecerCaixa grant. The aim of the project is to promote the comprehension of unfamiliar cultures through their music, developing and using tools that can help with musical understanding.

The idea behind the project is that a music tradition, being deeply rooted in the society in which it flourishes, can be an excellent gateway to understand a culture and its people. Despite our easy access to vast amounts of music recordings from around the world on Internet, it is still difficult their comprehension. However, it is now possible to develop interactive tools to help listeners better understand and appreciate the music of foreign cultures. In this project we will build on research done in CompMusic, using the gathered music corpora and the methodologies for their analysis. From that we will develop interactive tools for bringing closer these musical cultures to a broad audience. The practical goal is to promote these tools within a general public, organizing open seminars, workshops, and concerts, in the city of Barcelona. Our ultimate aim is to help build MUSICAL BRIDGES between the communities that conform our contemporary multicultural society.

RecerCaixa grants finance research projects carried out by investigators from the universities and research centres of Catalonia and it has two primary goals: to encourage scientific research of excellence and bring science closer to society, involving citizens in scientific advances and the benefits for humans and society.