Located in Como, the Sound and Music Computing Lab was founded in 2006 by the Image and Sound Processing Group (ISPG) of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, with the help and support of the Polo Regionale di Como. The laboratory collects expertise from the ISPG Lab in the areas of audio and acoustics and focuses on various research projects in these areas. The laboratory also supports some of the didactic activities of the curriculum on “Sound Engineering and Design”, of the Computer Science and Engineering Degree program.

The SMC laboratory includes the following facilities:

 

Experimental recording studio – 120 sqm of acoustically-controlled environment that accommodates traditional musical instruments (including a grand piano and a drum set), electronic and virtual musical instruments. The control room is equipped with a digital multichannel recording system that includes a 48-channel digital mixer (Yamaha 02R96), a storage system (Alesis HA24, 24 channels at 96 KHz and 24 bit), and a high-performance mainframe that accommodates high-end sound acquisition cards (32 full-duplex channels at 192 KHz, 24 bit). The studio also includes various multi-effects, MIDI patch bays, and MIDI controllers.

 

Rendering room – a quiet and “dry” room (almost anechoic), used for experiments of acoustic and audio-visual rendering. The room is completely lined with heavily absorbing material and its acoustics can be freely modified by properly positioning diffusive panels. The almost anechoic behavior of the room enables experiments of holophonic rendering based on loudspeaker arrays. Open space lab multi-purpose lab equipped with numerous PC workstations, MIDI keyboards and multichannel soundcards. This lab focuses on a wide range of applications that require PC-intensive work. It currently focuses on space-time processing techniques based on arrays of microphones (such as source localization, tracking and separation), arrays of speakers (acoustic beamforming, geometric wavefield synthesis, etc.), sound synthesis and sound/voice analysis.

 

HCI Lab – The Human-Computer Interaction Lab was set up in collaboration with Como’s Conservatory of Music, for research and didactic experiments of HCI in musical applications. In this lab it is possible to develop novel HCI mechanisms and conduct experiments with them, using specialized sensors and motion tracking systems for multimodal applications. In addition to the workstations with multichannel sound cards, microphones and MIDI keyboard, the laboratory is equipped with a Theremin Etherwave, two firewire cameras, a projector, a multitouch surface control Lemur/Jazzmutant, two Wacom graphic tablets, control devices used for gaming applications such as joystick, gamepad and Wii. The laboratory also enables the handling of other types of sensors (Arduino, Wiring, Eobody, I-CubeX) for the development of novel HW and SW prototypes.