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This summer, I got a phone call from TEDx Arendal asking about whether I would like to hold a lecture for this year’s event. Of course, I had to accept! The excitement of being asked turned to awe when they asked me whether I would like to stand still in silence for the whole talk. This request did not come out of the blue. I have spent the last 15 years researching human standstill and have gotten some attention for my stillstanding project last year when I stood still for 10 minutes every day for a year....

In this post I write about how it is possible rename all the photos in a folder based on the date and time information stored in the file. I mainly take photos with my mobile phone these days (a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S23) but occasionnaly also use “regular” cameras. As opposed to my phone, which saves the files with a filename that includes date and time (YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg), these cameras typically just use some random name (e....

Peer review is the gold standard for scientific work. Some people argue that the fact that an article has been peer-reviewed is what makes it scientific. I would not go that far. In my opinion, research is scientific because it is conducted according to scientific standards, not because someone else has read it. However, having peers review your work is a quality mechanism that ensures that others agree that those scientific standards have been met....

Yesterday, I wrote about why I don’t like MS Teams. My frustration about this Microsoft product (or perhaps better, platform*) could have been directed at most other commercial platforms. Common to all is the attempt to lock users into a software ecosystem that they cannot easily escape without losing their information. But what is the option? Over the years, I have developed my own workflows, including practical strategies for handling files and folders....

We have MS Teams at the University of Oslo (as in many other places), and it is increasingly used by administrative staff. Some academics use it as well, but less so in my experience. I use it when other people force me to, but I would never force others to use it. In this blog post, I explain why. No Linux support I have been using exclusively Linux-based operating systems for more than ten years....

We are fortunate to have received funding from UiO’s infrastructure board to purchase a new Yamaha Disklavier grand piano for the Department of Musicology. We have applied for this several times and are grateful to the university for making such an investment. To celebrate the new instrument, we organized the seminar New Horizons in Piano Performance Research during which I did a “lecture-recital” talking a little about the history of piano research in the department and stress-testing the new instrument....

Today, we organized a Workshop on Concert Research at RITMO. I held the opening lecture, giving an overview of the concert research conducted in the fourMs Lab at the University of Oslo from the early 2000s to today. Over the years, we have explored and refined our data capture methods. Initially, we did qualitative observation studies combined with interviews and performer diaries. Then, we moved on to video-based analyses, including the development of the Musical Gestures Toolbox....

This text was written for the festschrift for the symposium on 6 September 2024 celebrating Marc Leman’s achievements as professor of Ghent University and marking his retirement. In his seminal book Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology, Marc Leman (2008) drew up a theoretical framework that has influenced a whole new generation of researchers, myself included. Building on a long tradition of systematic musicology, combined with ecological psychology and modern technology, he convincingly set the direction for a fresh approach to scientific studies of musical experiences....

I am on vacation in Chile and exploring various techniques for recording sounds around me. I do some outdoor recordings but try to focus on indoor environments because of my ongoing AMBIENT project. In this blog post, I reflect on how challenging it has been. Annual projects The recordings are part of my annual sonic rhythm project, which is my third annual project. In 2022, I recorded one sound action per day....

I am on vacation in northern Chile and encountered an interesting staircase in one of our hotels. The uppermost step was a little higher than the others, causing the whole family to stumble almost every time we passed it on the way upwards. Similarly, we always got a few extra centimeters when walking down, making us almost fall over when starting the escalation. This staircase reminded me about action programs, the anticipation of actions based on a perceived rhythm....