David Dalmazzo

David Dalmazzo is a researcher, musician and programmer working at the intersection of music, artificial intelligence and interaction design.

Since September 2025 he is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music Technology Group (MTG), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, where he leads ANIMA — an AI-based interactive microtonal compositional assistant. Supervised by Sergi Jordà, with a secondment at the Algomus team (CRIStAL, CNRS – Université de Lille) under Mathieu Giraud, ANIMA develops human-centred generative models and psychoacoustic tools for exploring harmony beyond twelve-tone equal temperament (31-TET and 53-TET).

Before that he spent three years (2022–2025) as a postdoctoral researcher in the division of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, working with Bob L. T. Sturm in the ERC-funded MUSAiC project. There he modelled harmonic progressions with transformer language models — The Chordinator and ChromaFlow — and analysed the musical form and structure of large collections of AI-generated music from Udio and Suno in comparison with human-made pop music. Earlier, he held a one-year Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellowship at UPF (2021).

He holds a PhD in Information and Communication Technologies from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2020), completed at the MTG’s Machine Learning Lab under Rafael Ramírez within the EU project TELMI, with a dissertation on machine-learning and deep-learning approaches to modelling musical gestures. Earlier he was a research assistant at SPECS (UPF), developing BrainX3, an interactive visualisation of the human connectome. He holds an MSc in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media (UPF), a postgraduate diploma in Music Composition and Contemporary Technologies (UPF, honours) and a BSc in Music with a major in Sound Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá.

Alongside research, David has worked for more than fifteen years as an interactive developer and artist: technical director and production-centre manager at Laboral Art Centre (Gijón), programmer and artist for Open Lab Company (Rome) directed by Luca Ruzza, interactive visuals for Mobile Homes (Oslo) directed by Zoe Christiansen, and installations for Domestic Data Streamers, Onionlab, MID and CaixaForum, among others — shown at Museo Picasso, Fundació Joan Miró, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, CCCB, Mobile World Congress and the Milano Expo. He is also a guitarist and electronic-music composer.

He has taught programming, data visualisation and interaction design at UPF, IAAC, Elisava, LCI Barcelona, Laboral Art Centre and Università Sapienza.