Posts

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....

I am happy to announce that Cagri Erdem and I have written a chapter titled “Gestures in ensemble performance” in the new book Together in Music: Coordination, Expression, Participation edited by Renee Timmers Freya Bailes, and Helena Daffern. Video Teaser For the book launch, Cagri and I recorded a short video teaser: https://youtu.be/Fd2kIAeorRk Abstract The more formal abstract is: The topic of gesture has received growing attention among music researchers over recent decades....

At the NordicSMC conference last week, I was part of a panel discussing the topic Rigorous Empirical Evaluation of SMC Research. This was the original description of the session: The goal of this session is to share, discuss, and appraise the topic of evaluation in the context of SMC research and development. Evaluation is a cornerstone of every scientific research domain, but is a complex subject in our context due to the interdisciplinary nature of SMC coupled with the subjectivity involved in assessing creative endeavours....