My name is Victor Zappi

I am an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at the College of Arts Media and Design, Northeastern University [Boston, US].

Being both an engineer and a musician, I focus on the design and the use of new interfaces for musical expression. How can we use today’s most advanced technologies to build novel musical instruments? In what ways can these instruments comply with and engage our physical and cognitive abilities [even beyond what traditional instruments can do]? And what new forms of musical training and practices are required to master them? In line with Northeastern’s commitment to “humanics”, I am trying to answer these questions by combining research in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, with Musicology, Performance Studies and Music Education.

I hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science/Engineering from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia/Università degli studi di Genova [2012], with a dissertation on the exploration of Virtual Reality technologies in the context of music and performance. After the conclusion of my Ph.D., I continued working on immersive musical technologies at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris [France], as a member of the Sound Music Movement Interaction team. In 2013 I joined the Augmented Instruments Lab, at Queen Mary University of London [UK], where I specialized in digital musical instrument design and started to study the psycho-physiological phenomena that characterize the process of music making. Between 2015 and 2017, I worked as a research fellow at the Human Communication Technologies Lab, University of British Columbia in Vancouver [Canada]; here I focused on articulatory vocal synthesis and on the design of digital musical instruments powered by innovative physical models that blend audio and visuals.

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