We present the GiantSteps project, an EU-funded project/ninvolving institutions from academia, practitioners, and industrial/npartners with the goal of developing new concepts for/nintelligent and collaborative interfaces for music production/nand performance. At the core of the project is an iterative,/nuser-centric research approach to music information retrieval/n(MIR) and human computer interaction (HCI) that is designed/nto allow us to accomplish three main targets, namely (1) the/ndevelopment of intelligent musical expert agents to support/nand inspire music makers, (2) more intuitive and collaborative/ninterfaces, and (3) low-complexity methods addressing lowcost/ndevices to enable affordable and accessible production/ntools and apps. In this paper, we report on the main findings/nand achievements of the project’s first 18 months.

This work is supported by the European Union Seventh/nFramework Programme FP7 / 2007-2013 through the GiantSteps/nproject (grant agreement no. 610591).