Variazioni

• Fundación Isaac Albéniz (Spain)
  
  
• Germinus XXI (Spain)
  
  
• Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Universitá degli Studi di Firenze (Italy)
  
  
• Rigel Engineering S.R.L. (Italy)
  
  
• Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
  
  
• Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (Lithuany)
  
  
• Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel (KCB), department of Erasmushogeschool Brussel (EHB)
  
  
• Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo do Porto (Portugal)
  
  
• Sibelius Academy (Finland)
  
  
• Association Europeenne des Coservatoires, Academies de Musique et Musikhochschulen (AEC)
  
  
• Exitech, Extreme Information Technology S.R.L.(Italy)
  
  

www.fundacionalbeniz.com
 

The Fundación Albéniz was created by Paloma O'Shea in 1987, in order to offer a legal and financial framework to the growing musical activities coming out of the International Competition for Piano taking place in Santander from 1972.

FIAs activity concentrates on four areas: research, teaching, dissemination and creation, joined up to specific programmes related among themselves. One of the main programmes is the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía - an academic institution based on musical excellence teaching for young musical talents, and which counts among their students some big musicians of our time - is recognized internationally in terms of their quality music teaching (production) and the professional musicians/maestros visiting their institution.

One of the main objectives of FIA is to promote musical creation and interpretation of contemporary musical pieces. In this way, FIA stimulates musical creation in Spain through patronage.

Since a decade ago, the Fundación Albéniz took advantage of the technological revolution and contributed to make knowledge universal and exportable through the elaboration of technological models.

The next step was to utilize audiovisual means as a format, facing the problem of losing the teachings of exceptional maestros of our Reina Sofía School such as Alfredo Kraus or Yehudi Menuhin. This concerns to preserve our patrimony and having available digital video tools as an ideal means to do it, we created our own computer platform with the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. The result of this tenacious investigation has been the development of the Virtual School of Music, an extraordinary pedagogical resource which places at the disposal of everybody throughout the world the teachings and explanations of the most outstanding music maestros.

For the European and world-wide promotion of the Virtual School of Music, the Fundación Albiéniz has developed the HARMOS project, an ambitious project that aims to reuse information produced by public education institutions in the area of Cultural Heritage, by creating a digital collection in a multilingual format and making it available online.

www.germinus.com
 

Germinus is a Spanish company specialized in consulting and development of innovative solutions in the field of new technologies. Germinus incorporates fixed and mobile technologies to productive and business customers' processes.

Germinus has carried out important projects in the development and deployment of collaborative portals in the educational community, such as Educamadrid, EduCantabria, Educacion.es, Red.Es in regional and national educational institutions in Spain and the development of the portal of the Instituto Madrileño Business Projects Consultant Network. Germinus implements specific systems integration solutions, and offers a wide experience in design, dimensioning and deployment of network infrastructures, and information systems platforms that enable a new generation of applications and services.

The expertise developed by this institution suppose a great guarantee for the VARIAZIONI project in order to create a software quality product that can be later exploited, by the usage of best-practices of the industry. Additionally, the experiences developed in local governmental levels will be very useful to define the trans-national experiences

www.disit.dsi.unifi.it
 

The DSI presents several different competencies: artificial intelligence, software engineering, multimedia, systems, automatic control, environmental aspects, operative research, speech recognition, database navigation, image modelling.

At the DSI there are a few research groups. That involved in the project is chaired by Prof. P. Nesi. That group is strongly active in the field of: software engineering, computer music, parallel architectures, object-oriented, real-time techniques, distributed systems, multimedia, graphic user interfaces, software quality and assessment, testing, etc. The group of DSI which is involved in this project is and has been present in several national projects and in the European projects: ESPRIT I SESEFA, Race project TELEMED, ESPRIT III MEPI DIM 45 OFCOMP, MUPAAC ESPRIT IV, ICCOC ESPRIT IV, VISICON IST EUTIST FP5, OPTAMS IST EUTIST FP5, etc.

www.rigel.li.it
 

RIGEL Engineering Srl is an Italian ICT company specialised in digital content and rights management, advanced multi-modal user interfaces and networking technologies.

RIGEL's R&D unit gained important experience participating, managing and co-ordinating R&D projects at international level, acquiring and consolidating know-how and competencies in different areas: user-centred human machine interfaces, speech technologies, digital assets, web applications and web services, networking technologies.

The whole software development cycle is covered from feasibility studies to implementation, operation and maintenance. Different methodologies for software development (Waterfall, Rapid Application Development, Catalysis, Extreme Programming, UML, OOA&D) are applied according to the requirements, constraints and nature of the specific project and of the specific phase of the project.

According to the company strategic objectives of improving the current offer of product and services and developing brand new technologies and products, RIGEL aims to exploit the results of VARIAZIONI project by:

• Adding appealing web2.0 features to existing products and services for multimedia content management and distribution, in particular, for products and services dedicated to art galleries and museums,
• Developing a new content enrichment tools based on semantic technologies investigated in the project VARIAZIONI, for developing a complete service for content on-demand to offer to museums, art galleries, restoration offices, and in general to all the organisations needing to use or provide content in integrated forms.

www.mtg.upf.edu
 

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (www.upf.edu), which is Catalonia's fourth publicly funded university, is a young university, yet it already has its own little slice of history: it was founded in 1990 with 316 students taking two degree courses, and today it has 9,000 students, fourteen degree courses and an expanding campus in the heart of Barcelona. It is a young but rapidly expanding public university, having earned a strong reputation in its ten years of existence, some of their degrees being the highest in demand in Catalonia.

Two research groups of the Technology Department of the UPF will participate in the project: The Music Technology Group (MTG) and the Distributed Multimedia Applications Group (DMAG).

The Music Technology Group, MTG (www.mtg.upf.edu), created in 1994 and part of the Technology Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, specializes in audio processing technologies and their musical and multimedia applications. With more than 40 researchers coming from various disciplines, the MTG carries out research and development projects in areas such as audio processing and synthesis; audio identification; audio content analysis, description and transformation; singing voice synthesis and transformation; interactive systems; and software tools.

The MTG is currently working in many public funded projects, both at the EU and national levels, and private funded projects with companies like Yamaha, mSoft, SGAE, Telefónica I+D, Tape Gallery and DUY.

lmta.lt
 

The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre is a conservatoire, which is a public, government-funded university-type higher education institution with about 1000 students. The origins of the Academy go back to 1919. The programme is organized into four faculties: Piano and Musicology, Vocal and Instrumental Music, Theatre and Film, Kaunas, and has a Musicology Research Institute and Junior Music School. It has a teaching staff of 310 members with 66 professors and 113 docents; Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, Wind Instruments Orchestra, Big-Band, folk instruments orchestra , three choirs, opera and drama studios.

The Audio Video and Internet Centre is a structural division of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Audio facilities include CD and DAT players and record/cassette decks as well as video players and a substantial library of 32.000 recordings. Every member of the Academy's society has a right to use all services and information of the Centre for free, including video and audio equipment, the collection of recordings, catalogues, databases, etc. The Centre was established in 1999 as the successor of the Academy's Laboratory of Sound Recordings.

All these valuable contents of the Academy will be use in the platform. Additionally the great expertise developed in those projects will be very useful to define the structures of contents and courses. The participation of the HARMOS project meant an increase in their pedagogical audiovisual archives.

www.kcb.be
 

The Brussels Conservatoire was founded in 1832. Since then it has been known as one of the most important musical education institutions of Belgium. Students from all over the world give the musical life at The Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel a very international character.

The institution maintains its well established tradition of excellence in education through the study of contemporary and historical repertoires. It offers also a wide program to its students through the development of its sections of ancient music, jazz and musical.

The Conservatoire is housed in a historical 19^th-century building by Jean-Pierre Cluysenaer. Its famous concert hall with a unique Cavaillé-Coll organ has excellent acoustics. The hall plays an important role in the musical life of the city where the own concerts are performed among productions of other organizations such as the International Queen Elisabeth Competition.

The library of the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel possesses a world-famous collection of around 1 million volumes, mainly scores, but also books, reference works, periodicals, and illustrations. The library catalogue with up-to-date description standards can be consulted online.

For the historical documents of VARIAZIONI the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel focuses on manuscripts and prints of music of the 17th and 18th centuries, using the rich collections Westphal (with manuscripts of Telemann and C.P.E. Bach) and Wagener (German and Italian chamber music). Also librettos, educational works and some lithographs, images and historical recordings will be presented.

Finally The Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel will present more than 75 hours of audiovisual contents of master classes of its teaching staff created for the HARMOS project.

www.esmae-ipp.pt
 

The Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo do Instituto Politécnico do Porto was created in 1985, with the aim of promoting local development trough Music and Dance in Porto. The Escola has a teaching staff of 75 docents and about 450 students.

The main music education programmes are: Singing, Composition, Instrumental training (piano, guitar, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, bassoon, flute, saxophone, trumpet, oboe), Production and Music Technologies, and Jazz.

One of the aims of the Escola is promote the permanent contact between young actors and musicians, as an enrichment for their future artistic career. The Escola organizes frequently concerts and performances of the Symphony Orchestra, the Saxophones Orchestra and the Jazz Orchestra.

www.siba.fi
 

The Sibelius Academy is the only music university in Finland and one of the biggest in Europe. In addition to providing the highest education in the field of music, it engages in performance and creative art and research and is committed to the fostering of Finland's musical culture and cultural heritage. It also seeks active collaboration with Finnish society and participates in the development of culture.

The advantage expertise of the use of the new technologies (Finland it's one of the European countries with high use of internet) will be very useful to reach the objectives of the project. The Sibelius Academy initiated many years ago the digitalization of their archives. Additionally they have a great expertise in the development of music databases as has a Theses Database, which publications are provided in PDF format, and that is in the bibliographic database of Finnish Art University Libraries. As the rest of the contents partners they will participate in the definition of the structure of the content enrichment portal and to define the contents of the courses. The real validation with their students and teachers means a great way to guarantee the work done during the project. Additionally the Academy will participate in the evaluation and dissemination of the project.

www.aecinfo.org
 

The Association Europeenne des Conservatoires, Academies de Musique et Musikhochschulen (AEC) is a European cultural and educational network established in 1953, which represents the interests of more than 230 institutions in all European countries concerned with training for the music profession. The Association wants to reach this aim by:

• Stimulating and supporting international collaboration between member institutions
• Realising various international projects about relevant subjects in professional music training
• Organising an Annual Congress and various specific seminars for its members
• Representing the interests of the professional music training sector on national, European and international level.

Members of the AEC are represented by the AEC Council, which consists of representatives from twelve member institutions. AEC members elect these representatives for 3-year terms of office during the Association's Annual General Assembly. The decisions of the Council and the General Assembly are implemented by the AEC Office, which is based in Utrecht (the Netherlands). The AEC Office is responsible for the preparation and implementation of the AEC policy and the practical organisation of AEC activities.

The AEC has a pro-active policy towards the initiation and participation in European programmes: currently, it is running the biggest project in the EU ERASMUS programme to date, called the Thematic Network for Music Polifonia, as well as several other projects in the ERASMUS MUNDUS, EU/USA, CULTURE 2000 and SOCRATES programmes.

In addition, it organises several large meetings and conferences that are attended by many directors, international relations coordinators, professors and students from institutions from all over the world each year.

www.exitech.fi.it
EXITECH was funded in 2001 as the result of an aggregation of experts coming from research centres, industrial companies and consultancy with a large experience in ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) fields from both technical and marketing point of view.
EXITECH can be considered a spin_off of
 

• - High Technology Agency CESVIT - a company involved in technology transfer and innovation
• - SED (Special Electronic Design), which was the main shareholder of Exitech and is present on the market since 1975 as a builder of electronic equipment.

EXITECH is working on applications in which the technology of distributed and parallel systems is relevant. These applications are quite pervasive, they range from industrial applications for quality control to distribution of media content on the Internet. Behind these applications, specific technologies are needed, distributed systems, real-time systems, software engineering, streaming, protection aspects, reliability, networking, etc.