Sergi Jordà (born November 15, 1961) is a Catalan innovator, installation artist, digital musician and Associate Professor at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is best known for directing the team that invented the Reactable. He is also a trained Physicist.

Life and career

Sergi Jordà was born in Madrid, where his father was directing the film El Día de los Muertos (1961). His father was the award-winning Catalan film director and writer Joaquín Jordà.

Sergi Jordà graduated with a BSc in Fundamental Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1987 while also completing music studies. He was an early adopter of computer programming devoted to live computer music, and one of the pioneers of this field in Spain. During the 1990s he conducted doctorate studies in Artificial Intelligence with the UNED and collaborated with renowned Catalan artists Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca or La Fura dels Baus on award-winning interactive installations (Joan the Meat Man and Epizoo, 1996), multimedia performances (Afasia, 2002), and applications for collaborative music creation over the Internet (FMOL, 1999–2002).

In 1999 he joined Dr Xavier Serra who was establishing the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Sergi Jordà's doctorate dissertation Digital Lutherie (Jordà, 2005) at UPF-MTG set the foundations for new kinds of musical computers for performance and improvisation, based on visual feedback and spatial multiplexion. Between 2003 and 2006, together with Günter Geiger, Martin Kaltenbrunner and Marcos Alonso, Sergi Jordà developed the Reactable: an electronic music instrument combining a tangible tabletop interface with principles derived from modular synthesizers such as those developed by Bob Moog in the early 1960s.

The Reactable was popularised by Björk, who incorporated it into her 2007 Volta Tour. It has since been performed extensively and is on display in numerous science and art centres worldwide, including the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Discovery World in Milwaukee, Discovery Place in Charlotte, Montréal Science Centre, Science Centre Singapore, Museo Papalote del Niño in Mexico, Santralistanbul in Turkey, the ZKM in Germany or the INTECH centre in the UK. In October 2010 Reactable mobile launched for the iPhone and the iPad and within 2 weeks became top music application download in 20 countries.

Awards

Selected publications

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