Marco Scirea
Associate Professor - Game Designer - Musician

About


I am currently an Associate Professor in the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at University of Southern Denmark as part of the Game Development and Learning Technologies group.

I have completed my PhD in Affective Music Generation and its Effect on Player Experience as part of the Center for Computer Games Research games at the IT University of Copenhagen.

My PhD research investigated the expression of moods and the affective effect this mood-expressive music can have on the listener and applied this research to games: the final objective was to create a system where, by using a cognitive model of the player, we would be able to identify the player's emotional state and be able to reinforce or manipulate it through the use of mood-expressive music to improve user experience.

What this research hopes to achieve is creating better immersive experiences (reinforcement of current emotional state and playstyle) and help the designers create experiences where the players are put in a specific emotional state (manipulation).

I completed my Master degree in Information Technology through the Media Technology and Games program of IT University of Copenhagen in June 2014. During my master studies I have developed a great interest in Procedural Content Generation for games, especially of music. My research at the time created the basis of what now is my PhD work: the expression of affective meaning through computer-generated music.

I have also developed different types of games (both large and small) during my education and in my spare time. I received my Bachelor degree in Computer Science from the Università Statale di Milano in 2011, in which I specialized in artificial intelligence and mathematical logic.

I am currently teaching game development and continuing research on procedural content generation with, of course, a focus on music generation.

Research Interests

  • Affective computing
  • Algorithmic composition
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Creativity
  • Evolutionary Algorithms
  • Game AI
  • Procedural Content Generation
  • Computational Intelligence

Publications


Peer-Reviewed Journals

Per Trads Ørskov, Marco Scirea, et al. "Cognitive behavioral therapy with adaptive virtual reality exposure vs. cognitive behavioral therapy with in vivo exposure in the treatment of social anxiety disorder: A study protocol for a randomized controlled trial." in Frontiers in Psychiatry (2022)


Brown Joseph Alexander and Marco Scirea. "Evolving Woodland Camouflage" in IEEE Transactions on Games (2022)


Scirea Marco, Julian Togelius, Peter Eklund, and Sebastian Risi. "Affective Evolutionary Music Composition with MetaCompose" in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines PDF

Peer-Reviewed Conferences

Scirea, Marco, Mathias Torp Ernst, and Per Trads Ørskov. "Towards predicting social anxiety from biomarkers in a VR setup." Abstract in Cyberpsychology, Cybertherapy and Social Networking Conference (2023). Presentation


Matthiesen, Asge, Gunver Majgaard, and Marco Scirea. "The Process of Creating Interactive 360-Degree VR with Biofeedback." in International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2023).


Christiansen Sebastian and Marco Scirea. "Space segmentation and multiple autonomous agents: a Minecraft settlement generator" in IEEE Conference on Games (2022) PDF


Scirea Marco and Andrea Valente. "Boardgames and Computational Thinking: how to identify games with potential to support CT in the classroom." in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (2020) PDF


Scirea Marco. "Adaptive Puzzle Generation for Computational Thinking" in International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2020) PDF Presentation


Scirea Marco, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi. "Evolving in-game mood-expressive music with MetaCompose" in Proceedings of the Audio Mostly conference (2018) [Best Paper Award] PDF Presentation


Joseph Alexander Brown and Marco Scirea. "Procedural Generation for Tabletop Games: User Driven Approaches with Restrictions on Computational Resources" in Proceedings of the Software Engineering for Defence Applications (SEDA) (2018) PDF


Jonas Juhl Nielsen and Marco Scirea. "Balanced Map Generation using Genetic Algorithms in the Siphon Board-game" in Proceedings of the Software Engineering for Defence Applications (SEDA) (2018) PDF


Scirea Marco and Andrea Valente. "Thermal bead 3D printing: easy generation and realization of artistic 3D models for primary school pupils" in Procedural Content Generation Workshop at Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) (2018) [Position paper] PDF Presentation


Scirea Marco, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi. "Towards an experiment on perception of affective music generation using MetaCompose" in Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) (2018) PDF


Scirea Marco, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi. "Primal-Improv: Towards Co-Evolutionary Musical Improvisation" in Proceedings of the Computer Science & Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC) (2017) [Nominated for Best Paper Award] PDF Presentation


Scirea Marco, Peter Eklund, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi. "Can You Feel It? Evaluation of Affective Expression in Music Generated by MetaCompose" in Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) (2017) PDF


Scirea Marco, Julian Togelius, Peter Eklund and Sebastian Risi. "MetaCompose: A Compositional Evolutionary Music Composer" in Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt) (2016) [Best Paper Award] PDF Presentation


Scirea Marco and Joseph Alexander Brown. "Evolving Four Part Harmony Using a Multiple Worlds Model." in Proceedings of International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (2015) PDF


Scirea Marco, Gabriella A. B. Barros, Noor Shaker and Julian Togelius. "SMUG: Scientific Music Generator." in Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Creativity (2015) PDF


Scirea Marco, Mark J. Nelson and Julian Togelius. "Moody Music Generator: Characterising Control Parameters Using Crowdsourcing." in Proceedings of Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt) (2015) [Nominated for Best Paper Award] PDF


Scirea Marco, Byung Chull Bae, Yun-Gyung Cheong and Mark Nelson "Evaluating musical foreshadowing of videogame narrative experiences." in Proceedings of Audio Mostly (2014). PDF


Scirea Marco, Byung Chull Bae, Yun-Gyung Cheong and Mark Nelson "Mood expression in real-time computer generated music using Pure Data." in Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (2014). PDF


Scirea Marco. "Mood dependent music generator." in Proceedings of Advances in Computer Entertainment (2013). PDF

Projects


Games


Various