Currently under development at the Music Technology Group is The SAME Project: Sound and Music for Everyone Everyday Everywhere Every Way.

Music making and listening are a clear example of a human activity that is above all interactive and social, two big challenges for the new communication devices and applications. However, to date music making and listening is usually a passive, non-interactive and non-context sensitive experience. The current electronic technologies, with all their potential for interactivity and communication, have not yet been able to support and promote this essential aspect of music making and listening. This can be considered a significant degradation of the traditional listening and music making experience, in which the public was (and still is) able to interact in many ways with performers to modify the expressive features of a music piece.

With the rapid spread of mobile phones, we are currently witnessing one of the biggest disruptions in human communication history, and, at the same time, a fundamental change in personal content usage. Two interrelated trends are emerging, which are very likely to fundamentally and persistently change many aspects of our daily lives: (i) increased mobility of people and their devices, facilitated by mobile communications and mobile devices, and (ii) explosive growth and increasing importance of personal and of personalised content.

SAME addresses this by contributing to create new end-to-end systems for active, experience-centric, and context-aware active music listening. It aims at creating a new end-to-end networked platform for active, experience-centric, and context-aware active music listening. The project will answer to questions like “Which will be in the next 5 years the corresponding of the current iPod?”; “What kind of markets would such new devices open up?”

The SAME project is funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme, Theme ICT-2007.1.5, Networked media. Partners include:

Università degli Studi di Genova - Casa Paganini- InfoMus Lab, Italy (coordinator)
Nokia Research Center, Finland
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, France

For more projects under development at the Music Technology Group, see: 1; and 2.