The effect of skipping frames for video visualization

I have been exploring different video visualizations as part of my annual stillstanding project. Some of these I post as part of my daily Mastodon updates, while others I only test for future publications. Most of the video visualizations and analyses are made with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and structured as Jupyter Notebooks. I have been pondering whether skipping frames is a good idea. The 360-degree videos that I create visualizations from are shot at 25 fps....

May 20, 2023 · 3 min · 466 words · ARJ

Visualization of Musique de Table

Musique de Table is a wonderful piece written by Thierry de Mey. I have seen it performed live several times, and here came across a one-shot video recording that I thought it would be interesting to analyse: The test with some video visualization tools in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. For running the commands below, you first need to import the toolbox in Python: import musicalgestures as mg I started the process by importing the source video:...

May 10, 2023 · 2 min · 290 words · ARJ

Different Publication Cultures

At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities....

May 7, 2023 · 5 min · 898 words · ARJ

100 Days and Still Standing

Today marks the 100th day of my annual #StillStanding project. In this blog post, I summarize some of my experiences so far. Endurance Some people questioned whether I would be able to stand still every single day for an entire year. But, hey, it is only ten minutes (out of 1440) per day, and even though my life as a centre director is busy, it is always possible to find time for a standstill sometime during the day....

April 10, 2023 · 11 min · 2240 words · ARJ

Editing PDF metadata

Sometimes it is necessary to check, remove or modify the metadata of PDF files. Here is a quick post to show how it can be done in the terminal on Ubuntu Checking PDF metadata Most PDF viewers have an option for showing the metadata of PDF files. This can also be done in the terminal using the “pdfinfo” command-line tool. First, we need to install the “poppler-utils” package: sudo apt install poppler-utils Once installed, you can check the metadata by using the following command:...

April 10, 2023 · 1 min · 186 words · ARJ

Making 2D Images from 360-degree Videos

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording 360 videos with audio and sensor data while standing still for 10 minutes. I have started exploring how to visualize the sensor data best. Today, I am looking into visualization strategies for 360-degree images. I have written about how to pre-process 360-degree videos from Garmin VIRB and Ricoh Theta cameras previously. The Theta records in a dual fisheye format like this:...

April 1, 2023 · 2 min · 241 words · ARJ

Sound vs Audio

What is the difference between sound and audio? I often hear people confuse the terms. Here are a couple of ways of thinking about the difference. A good summary can be found in this blog post: Sound is vibrations through materials Audio is the technology to hear sounds coming from natural or human-made sources Another good definition is that audio is electrical energy (active or potential) that represents sound. From this, a sound recording is stored as an audio file....

March 21, 2023 · 1 min · 210 words · ARJ

New MOOC: Pupillometry – The Eye as a Window Into the Mind

I am happy to announce a new online course from RITMO: Pupillometry – The Eye as a Window Into the Mind. This is the third so-called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) I have been part of making, following Motion Capture and Music Moves. I am excited to get it started on Monday, 16 January. Discover the applications of pupillometry research Pupillometry is a relatively new research method within the sciences, and it has wide-ranging applications within psychology, neuroscience, and beyond....

January 13, 2023 · 2 min · 308 words · ARJ

Running a workshop with a Jupyter Notebook presentation

Today, I ran a workshop called Video Visualization together with RITMO research assistant Joachim Poutaraud. The workshop was part of the Digital Scholarship Days 2023 organized by the University of Oslo Library, four days packed of hands-on tutorials of various useful things. Presentation slides made by Jupyter Notebook Joachim has done a fantastic job updating the Wiki with all the new things he has implemented in the toolbox. However, the Wiki is not the best thing to use in a workshop, it has too much information and would create an information overload for the participants....

January 12, 2023 · 3 min · 585 words · ARJ

Testing Mobile Phone Motion Sensors

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording sensor data from my mobile phone while standing still for 10 minutes at a time. This is a highly curiosity-driven and data-based project, and part of the exploration is to figure out what I can get out of the sensors. I have started sharing graphs of the linear acceleration of my sessions with the tag #StillStanding on Mastodon. However, I wondered if this is the sensor data that best represents the motion....

January 3, 2023 · 5 min · 965 words · ARJ