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I often want to create motion videos, that is, videos that only show what changed between frames. Such videos are nice to look at, and so-called “frame differencing” is also the start point for many computer vision algorithms. We have made several tools for creating motion videos (and more) at the University of Oslo: the standalone VideoAnalysis app (Win/Mac) and the different versions of the Musical Gestures Toolbox. These are all great tools, but sometimes it would be nice also to create motion videos in the terminal using FFmpeg....

After two years in the making, I am happy to finally introduce our new online course: Motion Capture: The art of studying human activity. The course will run on the FutureLearn platform and is for everyone interested in the art of studying human movement. It has been developed by a team of RITMO researchers in close collaboration with the pedagogical team and production staff at LINK – Centre for Learning, Innovation & Academic Development....

I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012. Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4CBsDT37I As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still....

Over the last few years, I have worked on a book project with the working title Sound Actions. The manuscript has been through peer reviewing and several rounds of editing and will be published by The MIT Press sometime in 2022. Action-Sound Couplings and Mappings The book is based on the action-sound theory I developed as part of my dissertation. My main point is that we experience the world through action-sound couplings and mappings....

I have previously written about how it is possible to “flatten” a Ricoh Theta+ recording using FFmpeg. Now, I have spent some time exploring how to process some recordings from a Garmin VIRB camera. Some hours of recordings The starting point was a bunch of recordings from our recent MusicLab Copenhagen featuring the amazing Danish String Quartet. A team of RITMO researchers went to Copenhagen and captured the quartet in both rehearsal and performance....

This blog post is written to have a URL to send to Elsevier editors that ask me to review for their journals. I have declined to review for Elsevier journals for at least a decade, but usually haven’t given an explanation. Now I will start doing it alongside my decline. My decision is based on a fundamental flaw in today’s commercial journal publishing ecosystem. This is effectively summarized by Scott Aaronson, in an analogy in his Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky...

I had a period in the early 2000s when I made a few pieces in the genre of electroacoustic music (“tape music”). One of these was a 4-channel piece called Peer Peer, made for an exhibition opening at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in 2003. The piece was based on a montage of short snippets sampled from Edvard Grieg’s music to the play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. Someone asked about the piece the other day, so I decided to find the files....

I continue my testing of the new Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. One thing is to use the toolbox on controlled recordings with stationary cameras and non-moving backgrounds (see examples of visualizations of AIST videos). But it is also interesting to explore “real world” videos (such as the Bergensbanen train journey). I came across a great video of flamenco dancer Selene Muñoz, and wondered how I could visualize what is going on there:...

Like many others, I bought a kayak during the pandemic, and I have had many nice trips in the Oslo fiord over the last year. Working at RITMO, I think a lot about rhythm these days, and the rhythmic nature of kayaking made me curious to investigate the pattern a little more. Capturing kayaking motion My spontaneous investigations into kayak motion began with simply recording a short video of myself kayaking....

After a fairly long publication process, I am happy to finally announce a new paper: Best versus Good Enough Practices for Open Music Research in Empirical Musicology Review. Summary The abstract reads: Music researchers work with increasingly large and complex data sets. There are few established data handling practices in the field and several conceptual, technological, and practical challenges. Furthermore, many music researchers are not equipped for (or interested in) the craft of data storage, curation, and archiving....