Thanks to the widspreading of the Internet; to the recent dematerialization trends; and to the birth of new content streaming services, digital audio is today enjoying a renewed spring, which comes with a vertiginous economic growth. This creates a stronger and stronger need of expertise in the multimedia area, with particular emphasis on audio and sound. Millions of songs are at everyone’s grasp, within a few clicks of distance. They are accessible with excellent quality anywhere and at any time. But navigating in this sea of content requires advanced technologies, coming from machine learning and artificial intelligence, which must be swiftly employed for music information retrieval and music recommendation.

There is a strong pressure for new services that offer automatic generation of personalized audio streams; on-the-fly music composition/generation for interactive applications (particularly for the gaming industry). Social media are exerting a strong pressure for do-it-yourself music learning; for collaborative/distributed music composition/production (at both amatour and professional level); and for networked music performance. This calls for a level of technological expertise that goes beyond technical, and enters the realm of critical thinking, problem solving, solution design and  creative development.

The technological advancements of the past few decades have also been accompanied by an exponential growth of our expectations of quality in our listening experiences, which has pushed forward new formats of digital audio, accommodating high resolution; immersive rendering, and 3D audio.  

In the past few decades the need for acoustic comfort in living and public environments has grown significantly and keeps growing by the day. Acoustic comfort can be achieved through advanced architectural design methodologies; but also through a careful acoustic conditioning of existing environments. As far as musical instruments are concerned, expectations of quality have grown considerably as well, particularly on the part of the professional music performer, who often has needs ot timbral/ergonomic/acoustic personalization of their instrument.

In order to face all these new technological challenges, research has produced new methodologies for music information analysis, processing and retrieval, leading to new content navigation paradigms; and has developed advanced soundfield capturing and rendering solutions (spatial audio recording and reproduction) at high resolution. This is the results of the convergence of very diverse disciplines, including space-time signal processing; computatonal acoustics; machine learning and artificial intelligence; which have paved the way towards a wide range of advanced and exciting applications. Recent examples of applications are the vibrational, acoustic and timbral characterization of musical instruments; the interactive architectural acoustic design of listening environment; self-configuring systems for soundfield capturing and rendering. There is also a renewed interest and enthusiasm towards new technologies for advanced music/audio production and rendering on the part of the big companies that manage big date and social media; that produce mobile computing devices; etc.

The Master Program in Music and Acoustic Engineering is aimed at forming a new generation of experts and designers that are able to face all such challenges in the audio and acoustic areas (whether consolidated or emerging), by making synergistic use of a multi-disciplinary knowledge ranging from computer science to telecommunications (in particular signal processing and netwoks), from computational acoustics to numerical modeling/analysis, from electroacoustics to vibrational and room acoustics.