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Integra Lab

Integra Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab based at Birmingham Conservatoire, with a focus on musician-computer interaction. The lab was created in 2009 as a spin-off from the international Integra Project - supported by the Culture 2007–2013 programme of the European Union.

Integra Lab provides a unique opportunity for researchers in interactive music technology, user-centred design and digital signal processing to collaborate directly with performers and composers in the creation of musically meaningful experiences.

Being based at Birmingham Conservatoire enables the flow of ideas between disciplines needed to conduct research that addresses real-world problems encountered in artistic practice.

Download the full impact case study submitted to REF 2014

Follow us on Twitter: @integralab

Research themes

The interests of researchers based at Integra Lab include the following:

  • musician-centred interfaces
  • sustainability of live electronic music
  • multi-modal performance systems
  • audio feature extraction in live performance
  • haptics and tactile feedback
  • semantics of live musical interaction.
Activities

Integra Lab is currently engaged in a number of activities including:

Repertoire migration: This is the process of taking an existing piece of music that uses old obsolete technology and making a new version that can be performed with modern hardware and software. To date we have migrated works by Gérard Grisey, Jonathan Harvey, Philippe Hurel and others.

Harvey Performance

Interaction research: We work with performers and composers, and examine how they interact with technology with a view to designing new systems. This often takes the form of a collaborative project where the researcher and musician develop an idea or artistic work together over an extended period. This process generates a tapestry of knowledge that feeds reciprocally into new interaction design and development.

IEM Performance

Software development: Informed by work with existing repertoire and new artistic works, our software development methods seek to move beyond typical ‘academic’ software development to more sustainable and usable applications.

Integra Live
People

Projects

Integra Live

Integra Live is a software application for composing and performing live electronic music. It can be downloaded here. Further information can be found on the Integra project site.

LibXtract

LibXtract is a lightweight library for audio feature extraction. It provides over 50 audio features including f0 detection, MFCC, spectral moments, loudness, spectral flux etc. It is optimised for real-time applications, and has APIs in C, Python and Java. It can be downloaded from the project GitHub page.

Links

Integra Lab has collaborated with the following partners: