Centre for Music and Performance
Music app proves a big hit with Brazilian musicians
An electronic music app developed by a research team at Birmingham Conservatoire is proving a global hit - especially with a new generation of Brazilian musicians.
Integra Live is an application that allows musicians to design interactions between real instruments and computers using a simple, yet powerful interface.
The innovation has proved very popular and has already been downloaded more than 12,000 times worldwide - and some of the biggest interest has come from South America.
Lamberto Coccioli, Professor of Music and Technology at Birmingham Conservatoire, said the application is "interactive audio made simple" and explained why it was so popular in Latin America.
"The open source and free software movement is very strong in BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India and China] and other developing countries, where resources for costly proprietary software are limited.
"Moreover, the electronic music community in Brazil is quite established and has many crossovers with popular music, especially with electro-bossa musicians for example."
The software was originally supported through the EU-funded Integra Project and is now developed by Integra Lab at Birmingham Conservatoire. The software can be used in both teaching environments and professional artistic practice.
"We're delighted with the response to Integra Live," said Lamberto Coccioli. "It is an excellent example of artistic research with a wider impact - and an example of collaboration between composers, performers and researchers to develop tools that are both user-friendly and musically meaningful."
He added that a much anticipated new version is about to be released, following an intensive period of testing.
See our research interviews and find out more about the project here.
Integra Live appearance at Music Tech Fest results in 2,000 downloads
Music Technology researcher and Integra Lab co-founder Jamie Bullock recently demonstrated Integra Live at Music Tech Fest, which resulted in over 2,000 downloads of the software in a week.
Music Tech Fest is an annual music technology festival bringing together the worlds of industry, academic research, hacking, sound art, and media. Integra Live was also featured on tech blogs Synthopia, Palm Sounds and Animatek.