Connecting Media - Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg

Norbert Schnell
Connecting Media – Presentation abstract and biographical notes
About Composed Instruments and Virtual Scores: Research and Music Production at IRCAM. Having
grown up in Hamburg were I made my first steps in music and theater, were I got to know the early
versions of today state-of-the-art music production software and were I also had the chance to listen
to some of György Ligeti’s seminars at the HfMT, I am delighted to participate at Connecting Media
with a talk about my work today, my team and my working environment at IRCAM in Paris. Starting
from a brief introduction of IRCAM and its departments, this talk will give a summary of the para-
digms and technology developed over the past years at IRCAM in the field of interactive real-time
systems. A particular focus is given on recent developments and collaborations of the Real-Time
Musical Interactions team in audio and gesture recognition as well as interactive audio processing
including sound examples. The talk will insist on the relationships and influences of these projects
in the context of IRCAM’s music production (« création »), international research projects, and indus-
try collaborations. Norbert Schnell Head of the Real-Time Musical Interactions team at IRCAM
Biographie
Norbert Schnell is born in Hamburg where early he gets engaged in music composition and arran-
gement for theatre. He moves to Graz/Austria to study Telecommunications and Music. He becomes
studio assistant at the Institut für Elektronische Musik (IEM) and collaborated with the MusikLabor
Wien getting involved in contemporary music projects as adviser and developer. 1995 he obtains his
diploma as Toningenieur of the Technische Universität and the Universität für Musik und Darstellen-
de Kunst Graz and enters the Real Time Systems team at IRCAM as researcher and developer. Since
2002 he is coordinating the Real-Time Applications team at IRCAM that recently changed its name
to Real-Time Musical Interactions. He and his team are involved in scientific and artistic projects in
the domain of computer music focusing on real-time performer-computer interaction and interactive
audio applications. This research includes multiple aspects such as score-following, sensor techno-
logy and gesture analysis/recognition, real-time sound analysis, information retrieval, and synthesis,
interfaces and networks. Besides the engagement in artistic productions, his team participates in
international research projects (music technology and education) and collaborates with industry
partners from different fields (music, interfaces, automobile) on specific developments. In June 2006
he chaired the 6th Interna-tional Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, NIME 06, at
IRCAM.