Future Music Forum

Ventura Barba is the Co-founder & Chairman at Tenzing Media, a business advisory and consulting firm for the Creative Industries, specialised on helping business to adapt, growth or expand their businesses. Its roaster of clients ranges almost every activity and every agent within the Creative Industries’ value chain. Besides, the company develops business research and professional training and education programs for the Creative Industry.

He is also the COO at Advanced Music, the organizer of Sonar (The International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art) among other different activities.

Open Ear Ltd / Managing Director
2006 - Present
Open Ear is a music design company based in Glasgow. We help businesses enhance their customer experience, brand communication and staff motivation through the innovative use of music. check http://www.openearmusic.com for more details..
Education
Edinburgh University
Psychology, Sound Design, MA, MSc, 2005
 

In 1998 he joined the Music Technology Group (MTG), a world's top research lab in computer music science (http://mtg.upf.edu/). During that time he published in most relevant proceedings and journals, co-published a book and featured as author in more than 15 patents. After a few years as a researcher, lecturer, developer and manager on projects for companies such as Yamaha, Telefónica or Pinnacle, he co-founded Barcelona Music & Audio Technologies in 2006, the spin-off company of the MTG.

In 2007 he became Ph.D. magna cum laude in Computer Science and right after started as the Chief Strategy Officer at BMAT (www.bmat.com). A year and a half later he took over the position of Chief Executive Officer. As of today BMAT is an 20 people company with customers in Japan, US, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, UK, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Mexico, India, Brazil, Argentina, Russia and Kenya among which there is Telefonica, iMusica, Grooveshark, SESAC, BajaMúsica, TheOrchard, Intel, Nielsen and others.

Alex is also a music passionate, an accomplished composer, and member of international distribution bands. In 2004 he co-founded Safari Music, a record label through which he releases his own music.

Xavier Serra is Associate Professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. After a multidisciplinary academic education he obtained a PhD in Computer Music from Stanford University in 1989 with a dissertation on the spectral processing of musical sounds that is considered a key reference in the field. His research interests cover the understanding, modelling and generation of musical signals by computational means, with a balance between basic and applied research and approaches from both scientific/technological and humanistic/artistic disciplines. Dr. Serra is very active in promoting initiatives in the field of Sound and Music Computing at the local and international levels, being editor and reviewer of a number of journals, conferences and research programs of the European Commission, and also giving lectures on current and future challenges of the field. He is the principal investigator of more than 15 major research projects funded by public and private institutions, the author of 31 patents and of more than 75 research publications.