My Vita

Lorenzo Seno is Coordinator of the scientific activities at "Centro di Ricerche musicali", and is member of ECoNA, an interuniversity center made by researchers and teachers coming from twelve Italian Universities about cognitive processes. He is also one of the promoters of the AudionicaŽ, a small technology transfer  company in the domain of signal processing, acoustics  and Computer science. He is also owner of the NOVAInterLAB, a personal company devoted to the applications intermixing technologies, acoustics, music and visual arts. He has held classes in Advanced mathematical tools at the Faculty of Economics at the 3rd University of Rome, in Acoustics and sound synthesis at the Electronic Engineering Faculty. He currently teaches "signal processing" at the "Alfredo Casella " Conservatory (L'Aquila - Italy. University degree in Composition and Electronic Music, New Technologies and Music Department)
Lorenzo Seno was born in 1948 in Italy. He obtained at the "La Sapienza" University in Rome his "laurea cum laude" in Physics (which is a little more than a Master Degree; doctoral studies were introduced in Italy in 1982). Starting from seventies, he was involved into many aspects of computer and electronic technologies, and soon obtained positions of responsibility. He has been R&D manager, entrepreneur of a small consulting company, and consultant. During this time, he gained experiences in many fields.

Digital electronics: He specified, designed, and developed from prototyping to engineering and industrialization, both in hardware and firmware, process computers for electrically harsh environments. They were the "Sentinel" system, commissioned by AGIP, the Italian petrol state company , "BBS" and "Telemach", commissioned by a company owned partly by the Italian private petrol group "Jacorossi-Fintermica", partly by Olivetti-Tecnost. These computers were dedicated both to the control of the heat generating process and to the plants safety and security alarm transmission (fire, burglar, gas leakage ...).

As R&D Director, during six years he managed the technologic development of a network of thousands of such peripheral computers, which were connected via switched telephone line to many Central computers. He also conceived and specified an ASIC, in the frame of the European project JESSI-ChipShop.

Communication technology: he conceived, designed and developed, from prototyping to engineering and industrialization, MODEM subsystems for switched telephone lines and for UHF radio band, including protocols and firmware. As R&D Director he managed the design and the start-up in Rome of an UHF alarm transmission network of more than a thousand of peripherals. For this project, he conceived and managed the development and the test of a proprietary multiple access protocol.

Computer technology: he gained experiences in relational data bases (Oracle, Access, DBIV) and in Geographic Information Systems. In this field, he managed, as R&D and Marketing, a private company (which was an IBM VAR), owner of a proprietary GIS package. Recently he has developed some software prototypes of Geographic and multi-media data bases for the Italian "Ministero dei Beni Culturali". He used standard software such Mapinfo and Access.

Supercomputing and Digital Signal Processing: in the last years he also developed dynamical numerical models of heat generator-building system in the LabView environment. His real and accelerated-time simulator is currently used by the Italian heating services company S.I.R.A.M. for control system testing purposes. Following his interests in music (he studied piano for many years), in 1996 he became the scientific coordinator at CRM, a small private Research Center in Music technologies in Rome. Here he specified and managed the devolvement of a Basic Operating System for a DSP parallel architecture (Texas C40) devoted to the processing and synthesis of sounds. This project was commissioned by FIAT, the Italian private automotive industry. Now he is currently involved in research and development of sound spatialisation systems and musical instruments physical modeling. Recently he developed a LabView application to control a DSP subsystem for psychoacoustics.

Research: He made researches in the following fields:

• Time-frequency transformations (Wigner and wavelets), as a sound analysis and synthesis mean;
• NAH (Nearfield Acoustic Holography), as a mean for spatialisation;
• Full Ondulatory calculation methods of sound propagation (BEM)
• Non-linear models (to simulate musical instruments).
• Psychoacoustics (roughness, sharpness, loudness  of actual sounds, measure and modifications)
• Cortical activity mapping of human Auditory system.l 

He is currently member of Econa, an Interuniversity Italian Research Center on natural and artificial cognitive systems.

Teaching: He gave classes on Internet to Professors and Researcher of the "La Sapienza" First University in Rome. He also held classes to give an update about computer technology developments to RAI-TV technicians (RAI is the Italian broadcasting State company). 
Currently he teaches advanced computer mathematical tools at the Faculty of Economics at the 3rd University of Rome,  Acoustics and Sound Synthesis at the Department of Electronics of the 3rd University of Rome. He is currently also Professor of signal processing at the Conservatory "Alfredo Casella" - l'Aquila, Italy (University degree in Composition and Electronic Music, New Technologies and Music Department)