Frederic Font Corbera

sound and music technology researcher, software developer, musician, father (in no particular order)

I’m a senior researcher at Phonos, a pioneering centre in the field of music technology research associated with the Music Technology Group of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. I like everything that has to do with sound and music, software development, audio processing, synthesizers, and the like.

My research is focused on the areas of Machine Listening and Music Information Retrieval, with an emphasis on the analysis and description of large sound collections so that these become more useful in creative and scientific contexts. I’m interested in audio processing and machine learning techniques applied to a variety of audio-related applications such as sound classification, sound description and retrieval, acoustic monitoring, sound generation and transformation, sound exploration and creativity-support tools.

At the Music Technology Group I lead the Freesound project and all Freesound-related research Freesound is a website where people from all over the world share sounds under Creative Commons licenses. As of January 2024, Freesound hosts more than 600k sounds and has more than 14M registered users.

From 2016-2019, I was also the coordinator of the EU H2020-funded project Audio Commons, aimed at the promotion of Creative Commons audio and the development of technological solutions to facilitate audio description, indexing, reuse and publication.

I like working on other creative projects, typically with something to do with music technology and software development. I also play the bass guitar in a couple of bands and make noise with synthetisers. But most important of all, I have a kid who loves tractors and with whom I can build Lego spaceships.

Selected projects

• Freesound - the best place to share Creative Commons sounds, ever
• FSD50K - open large audio dataset based on Freesound
• SOURCE - an open-source hardware/plugin music sampler powered by Freesound

Selected side projects

• Shepherd - an open-source midi sequencer/clip triggerer
• Babu Frik - a tool to control and program KIJIMI synthetizer. Uses machine learning to create new synth patches :)
• J.F. Sebastian - similar to Babu Firk, a tool to control and program Deckard's Dream synthetizer
• Freesound Timeline - the Freesound history in sound
• Freesound Explorer - visual interface to explore Freesound in a 2-dimensional space and create music at the same time
• Freesound Loop Generator - tool to create crazy music loops with Freesound sounds and export audio and midi ready for your sampler
• push2-python - Python package to interface with Ableton's Push2
• Free Maschine! - unpredictable drum machine based on, you guessed it, Freesound
• superman - a simple command-line utility for audio mosaicing

Scientific publications

• List of academic publications
• Google Scholar
• PhD Thesis

Music

• Noko Woi
• My Freesound profile
• I should add the older stuff here...