After a year of primarily online activities, we are slowly preparing for a new reality at the university. We will not go back to where we left off, but what will the new university be? The front page of the EUA report Universities without walls. This post is inspired by a tweet by Rikke Toft Nørgård and a presentation she held on the development of the post-pandemic hybrid university. In the presentation, she points to a recent EUA report envisioning how universities should develop towards 2030....

I have recently played with AudioStellar, a great tool for “sound object”-based exploration and musicking. It reminds me of CataRT, a great tool for concatenative synthesis. I used CataRT quite a lot previously, for example, in the piece Transformation. However, after I switched to Ubuntu and PD instead of OSX and Max, CataRT was no longer an option. So I got very excited when I discovered AudioStellar some weeks ago. It is lightweight and cross-platform and has some novel features that I would like to explore more in the coming weeks....

I was challenged to say a few words about improving their personal web pages at the University of Oslo. This led to a short talk titled 23 tips to improve your web presence. The presentation was based on experiences with keeping my own personal page up to date, but hopefully, the tips can be useful for others. Why should you care about your employee page? Some of my reasons include:...

A piano is an instrument. So is a violin. But what about the voice? Or a fork? Or a mobile phone? So what is (really) a musical instrument? That was the title of a short lecture I held at UiO’s Open Day today. The 15-minute lecture is a very quick version of some of the concepts I have been working on for a new book project. Here I present a model for understanding what a musical instrument is and how new technology changes how we make and experience music....

I think it is nice to share this new short documentary about the project INTIMAL: Interfaces for Relational Listening – Body, Memory, Migration, Telematics today on 8 March. This project ran from 2017 to 2019 at RITMO, under the direction of sound artist Ximena Alarcon. It was funded by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant from the EU, and I was fortunate enough to mentor the project. The main aim of INTIMAL was to explore the body as an “interface” for keeping and transforming the memory of place in migratory contexts....

I am often dealing with folders with lots of files with weird file names. Spaces, capital letters, and so on, often cause problems. Instead of manually fixing such file names, here is a quick one-liner (found here) that can be run in the terminal (at least on Ubuntu) to solve the problem: rename 'tr/ A-Z/-a-z/' -- * It is based on a simple regular expression, replacing any spaces with hyphens, and changing any capital letters to lower case....

Many people have asked me about what types of microphones to use for streaming and recording. This is really a jungle, with lots of devices and things to think about. I have written some blog posts about such things previously, such as tips for doing Skype job interviews, testing simple camera/mic solutions, running a Hybrid Disputation, and how to work with plug-in-power microphones. Earlier today I held a short presentation about microphones at RITMO....

I came across a fantastic performance of a Bach prelude played on Boomwhackers by Les Objets Volants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5seI0eJZCg It is really incredible how they manage to coordinate the sticks and make it into a beautiful performance. Given my interest in the visual aspects of music performance, I reached for the Musical Gestures Toolbox to create some video visualisations. I started with creating an average image of the video: This image is not particularly interesting....

Yesterday, PhD fellow Mojtaba Karbassi presented his research on impedance control in robotic drumming at RITMO. I will surely get back to discussing more of his research later. Today, I wanted to share the analysis of one of the videos he showed. Mojtaba is working on developing a robot that can play a double stroke drum roll. To explain what this is, he showed this video he had found online, made by John Wooton:...

Recently, I have been engaged in an internal discussion at the University of Oslo about our institutional web pages. This has led me to realize that a university’s web pages are yet another part of what I like to think of as an Open Research “puzzle”: Cutting down on web pages The discussion started when our university’s communication department announced that they wanted to reduce the number of web pages. One way of doing that is by unpublishing a lot of pages....