Four Decades of Music Research, Creation, and Education at Padua's Centro di Sonologia Computazionale

Abstract

Research in computer music at the University of Padua, Italy, began in the early 1970s and was formalized in 1979 by establishing the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC). Since its foundation, CSC has established itself as a leading research center in the field of computer music. This article describes the scientific and musical research activities of the center and of the composers and members who worked in association with it in its first four decades. The center's historical background with its musical and scientific precursors is also chronicled, as are important events at CSC. An outline of its scientific research activity is then traced, with aspects of the technical details in its different areas of activities, showing the distinctive research ethos and the changing priorities of the center. Research from the 1970s is also included, as it led to the foundation of the CSC. Moreover, selected musical works, representative of CSC works from historical and scientific points of view, are described. Finally, perspectives for future developments are discussed.

The Magnetic Urtext: Restoration as Music Interpretation

“…The Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) of University of Padova has defined a rigorous scientific protocol for different interpretative approaches, during several restoration projects involving the most important European music archives ( Canazza and De Poli, 2020 ): in the following we describe two of them, used in restoration projects related to tape music.…”

Language Transfer for Identifying Diagnostic Paragraphs in Clinical Notes

“…The Cinema & Civiltà (C&C) corpus was conceived within the FONTI 4.0 as ground-truth for evaluating the performance of STT services on a real case study. To build the corpus, we transcribed speech recorded on four magnetic tapes made available by the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice and digitized at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale -CSC (Canazza and De Poli, 2020). The recordings are parts of the Cinema & Civiltà conference for the awarding of the San Giorgio prize, part of the Venice Film Festival, that took place between the 7 th and 9 th of September 1959, attended by important figures of the history of cinema such as Roberto Rossellini and representatives of the Italian literary critics such as Vittore Branca.…”

Reading Tapes Backwards: A Legitimate Approach to Saving Time and Money in Digitization Projects?

“…As a professional reel machine usually used for audio master recording, the Studer A810 (2-tracks, 1/4 inch), owned by the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale laboratory of the University of Padua, was picked for the experiment (CSC-http://csc.dei.unipd.it (accessed on 20 June 2021)-has been a leading research center in the field of computer music, creation and preservation over the last 50 years [25]). For the occasion, the machine was suitably overhauled with regards to both the electrical components and the mechanical ones, depending on the type of magnetic tape used for the experiment, a 1/4 inch RTM SM911.…”

“…Knowledge can be expressed in the form of scientific literature [2,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and applications [21][22][23][24] to (i) contribute to the normalisation of audio preservation practices and (ii) to support the systematic accumulation of existing and new knowledge, accelerating its capitalization. The authors have more than a decade of experience with audio preservation, as summarized in the overview articles [18,25].…”