About Adriano Farina

I hail from Parma, Italy, I'm a biker (both kinds) and a scuba diver. I'm a strong believer in the open web, in open standards, and in user agency.

I studied classics in high school and Electronics and Computer Science in my BEng. I then studied Documentary Cinema at the Cineteca di Bologna.

I'm currently doing a Master in Acoustics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano (MEng), and simultaneously a Master in Environmental Technologies for Physical Agents at the University of Bologna (it's still acoustics, but more focused on noise). Starting on 2024-11-01 I'm also working for the University of Bologna on the Agorà Project. My main academic interest is media technology, in particular the interaction between sound and video. Mostly that means working with spatial audio and XR.

I'm one of the 3 founders of E-MUSE, a startup working on the digitalisation and dissemination of cultural heritage artifacts.

Projects

In chronological order, leaving out lots of stuff.

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• 2007: Spatial Audio recordings, an Ambisonics recording of a baroque chamber music piece I did back in high-school.
• 2007-09: I presented my first acoustics paper at AES NY, it was a survey of the sound levels produced by my high-school classmates mp3 players.
• 2009-2011: first experiments with panoramic video and Ambisonics audio. Part of a research project with RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, in which panoramic video and spherical microphone arrays were used for synthesizing virtual microphone signals. My contribution was adapting a Processing script that converted a video feed of a parabolic mirror into an equirectangular video. I then integrated this script with the rest of the workflow using a bit of AppleScript.
• 2012: my first use of 360 video (again with Ambisonics audio) in an immersive room, for this paper, back when I was studying in York.
• 2013: Tin sculptures
• 2016: Verdi 360, I recorded several operas during the Verdi Festival here in Parma, starting from the 2016 edition, in 360° equirectangular video and with Ambisonics audio. Then I built a small site to host them. I was also tasked with demoing the resulting recordings with VR headsets to concert goers, during the breaks of subsequent operas and during research-dissemination events.
• 2018-03: I went on an expedition to the MaHRe research center on Magoodhoo island, in the Maldives. My tasks were taking 360° videos with Ambisonics audio, using a First Order Ambisonics hydrophone array, and helping with the testing of an experimental Third Order Ambisonics hydrophone array.
• 2019-09: Panarea Blackpoint underwater gas vents with Ambisonics audio and 360 video. Part of a preliminary study on an acoustic detection system for underwater gas releases, which would have been used in a CO2 storage project.
• 2019-12-13: presented my BEng dissertation project, A Room Scale Virtual Reality System with Spatial Audio Generation from Object Collisions
• 2020-08: an overview of the new EU reparaibility standards and their rationale, in Italian.
• 2020-10: A brief tutorial on how to use Ambisonics in Adobe Premiere
• 2020-10-27: Very rough draft: Responsive Video, allows for the same video to be displayed in portrait and landscape mode. Inspired by a homework project in film school, in which we had to commment in video form the introduction of a pandemic-mitigating curfew. As I had zero intention of venturing out, I mostly used video from social media, which was annoyingly vertical.
• 2020-11: An explanation on how to avoid flicker in video and how it works. Inspired by early difficulties in filming 360° videos in schools for the OrientaMente project.
• 2020-11-05: A super brief introduction to recording audio for video, written for my coursemates in film school.
• 2021-01: MIMO acoustical measurements, an explanation of the methodology used in the Artsoundscapes, Sipario and PHE projects.
• 2021-01: A summary of my VR works (updated to January 2021).
• 2021-03-04: A couple of silly logic puzzles, built in a couple of hours to test out Twine.
• 2021-03-05: From the cave to the stage: virtual spaces for performing arts, participation in a AIA webinar, part of the Waiting for Matera program.
• 2021-04-21: A panoramic tour, with an audio guide from the artist, of La pittura iperproteica by Enrico Robusti. This project formed the nucleus of my startup.
• 2021-08-01: A font stub for Maya Numerals, created for a web-game I was building as a present for a friend (and co-founder).
• 2021-09-08: 3D reconstruction of Modena's Pavarotti Theater, using photogrammetric data, impulse response measurements and anechoic recording. Part of a larger presentation at I3DA and part of the Sipario project.
• 2021-09-19: a Triple Oscillator for an Advanced Coding Methodologies class at Politecnico di Milano
• 2021-09-26: Bodoni: il carattere di Parma, a documentary on typographer and type designer Giambattista Bodoni. It was the final project for my documentary film school (Cineteca di Bologna).
• 2021-10-08: A Pixel Stacking experiment, taking pictures of the moon.
• 2021-11-27: 2 new papers from I3DA have been published on IEEE Explore:
  • 3dof representation of the acoustic measurements inside the Comunale-Pavarotti Theatre of Modena
  • Acoustic parameters of the Municipal Theatre of Piacenza shown on different ways of representation.
• 2022-05-08: a new paper was presented at the AES 152nd Convention in The Hague, on the measurement and modelling of the Great Hall of the University of Parma.
• 2022-07-07: my pitch (in Italian) for E-MUSE won the Bain special award at the first BCC Innovation Festival
• 2022-07-08: launch of the website for my new startup: e-muse.it. We create digital twins and XR experiences for preserving and disseminating cultural heritage artefacts.
• 2022-10-23: WebXR version of the immersive photo-gallery "L'attesa" on e-muse.it, featuring spatialized music and voices in a photogrammetric reproduction of the Casa Del Suono. By clicking on each photograph the user can listen to the corresponding text.
• 2022-10-23: 360 Video version of the immersive photo-gallery "L'attesa", with Ambisonics audio.
• 2022-10-28: WebXR "digital twin" of an energy and heat cogeneration plant, showcasing its noise profile. Part of a University of Parma project on active noise cancellation.
• 2023-01-20: D&D 3.5 cleric spell aid, using the local storage API. There are plenty of ready-made ones for the fifth edition, but we're old school.
• 2023-02-07: webXR reconstruction of the Greek-Roman theater of Tyndaris, in Sicily. Featuring a drone-based photogrammetric reconstruction and 6dof navigation and audio. Part of a collaboration with the University of Parma and the Politecnico di Torino.
• 2023-04-07: Launch of the first commissioned E-MUSE project, arteinbanca.it, an immersive showcase for the art collection of the BCC Venezia Giulia bank. It features the dynamic reconstruction of a kinetic wooden sculpture.
• 2023-06-28: Circle of Chords A project for the ACTAM exam, part of the Politecnico di Milano Master in Acoustics Engineering. It builds a sequence of major or minor triads, based on a circle of fifths constructed from an arbitrary note.
• 2023-08-12: I completed the Epic Bootcamp Animation 2023 - Europe: a 4 week program on the use of Unreal Engine for 3D animation, which resulted in a 30 second animation.
• 2023-09-30: I built a scraper for the news section of the Parma municipality, which creates an RSS feed. Here are the code and the resulting feed. It's pretty easy to adapt it to other municipalities, because they tend to share the same design system.
• 2023-10-11: Threads-RSS is an even smaller scraper, it creates and RSS feed for a Threads profile. I used it before Threads was available in Europe, but you can still use it to follow your favourite people without getting swept up in the rage-bait that populates its algorithmic feed.
• 2023-11-10: unlimitedSwiss goes around the 10-files-at-a-time download limit on SwissTransfer (like WeTransfer, but better)
• 2024-03-19: a webcam based OSC head tracker for binaural playback. (Also available on GitHub)
• 2024-06-03: the Unity version of the Tyndaris reconstruction was demoed at AIA Taormina by our colleagues from the Politecnico di Torino. In this version the sound is reproduced in six degrees of freedom using the impulse responses measured in-situ, so that the reverberation is realistic.
• 2024-08-23: I made this list filterable, the buttons at the top are supposed to act like the Solo buttons in Digital Audio Workstations. As I didn't want to use a JavaScript framework, the logic is pretty primitive, so you can only "solo" one tag at a time.
• 2024-09-20: BCC Innovation Festival 2024: E-MUSE is handling the immersive components. We built a multiplayer virtual world that can be accessed on phones, PC, and XR. Plus we've made the snazzy scrollable 3D experience on the festival homepage.
  For the actual Festival Day I made a digital twin of the venue, and created a 360° video projected in the room, showcasing the multiplayer virtual world mentioned above.
• 2024-10-03: A stupidly simple proportional calculator, useful for recipes and aspect ratios.
• 2024-10-29: The E-MUSE team was interviewed by StoryTime, and here is the video in its entirety.

Current Projects

• Unnannounced BCC cultural heritage digitalisation project, details coming 2024-11-28
• I'm working on the gamification of the multiplayer immersive world built for the BCC Innovation Festival
• 3D design (compatible both with Ambisonics and traditional surround, hopefully) and software setup (AllRAD) of an immersive listening room in Turin.
• A 6dof audio comparison paper, with integrated questionnaires.
• Restore Reader View to this page (I haven't figured out why I doesn't work anymore, so far).
• The Municipality of Parma announced the new urban planning document, called Parma 2050, in 2023. Their web presentation, available at parma2050.eu, is just a series of screenshots of the A4 PDFs. This is unacceptable, so I started my own site to present the information. I'm far behind, but you can read the first part at parma2050.it. I plan to incoporate proper GIS, readable typography, to produce EPUB downloads, maybe even print-ready CSS.

You can check out my papers here. The full text is always available.

Extended Bio

I hail from Parma, Italy, I'm a biker (both kinds) and a scuba diver.
I studied classics in high school and Electronics and Computer Science in my BEng. I'm currently doing a Master in Acoustics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. My main academic interest is media technology, in particular the interaction between sound and video.

I spent 2020 working for the Artsoundscapes Project. Basically I took acoustical measurements of caves with prehistoric paintings and performed photogrammetric recontructions during archeological expeditions and I developed a software workflow for the automatic computation of acoustical parameters. With that data it should be possible to create a 6DoF VR reconstruction of both the visual and auditory fields. This work is ongoing, as part of the Sipario and PHE projects.
I also sometimes work in media creation, in particular recording panoramic audio-visual experiences both on land (a collection of 360 recordings of the Verdi Festival here in Parma) and underwater (a manually stitched 360 video of Maldivian fish producing sounds). I've often done print-based design and editing projects, ranging from event posters to small newspapers and zines. I develop software on commission, mostly with Python. Finally, I have worked as a surveyor, mapping out a mountain area for a prospected development project.

In 2022 I founded E-Muse, a startup working in the digitization of cultural heritage and the creation of immersive experiences. We won the Bain award in the Innovation Festival BCC.

My bachelor dissertation project was a VR system for producing physically motivated sounds. I re-created a university lab in Unity, and added virtual objects that produce binauralized sounds based on their location and on the way they're physically handled, taking into account both their materials and the mechanical characteristics of their collisions.