I usually travel with my laptop. There is always some e-mails to write, some documents to read and comment on, or some photos to transfer. Still, I often think about whether it was really necessary to drag along the laptop on short trips. It doesn’t weigh too much, but I usually end up carrying a backpack when I bring the laptop. That may not always be a problem, but sometimes it limits mobility and flexibility....
Or, more specifically: can AI replace an artist? That is the question posed in a short documentary that I have contributed to for this year’s Research Days. We were contacted before summer about trying to create a new song based on the catalogue of the Norwegian artist Ary. The idea was to use machine learning to generate the song. This has turned out to be an exciting project. I was busy finishing the manuscript for my new book, so I wasn’t much involved in the development part myself....
Novelty is often highlighted as the most important criterion for getting research funding. That a manuscript is novel is also a major concern for many conference/journal reviewers. While novelty may be good in some contexts, I find it more important that research is solid. I started thinking about novelty versus solidity when I read through the (excellent) blog posts about the ISMIR 2021 Reviewing Experience. These blog posts deal with many topics, but the question about novelty caught my attention....
I have been running the disputation of Guilherme Schmidt Câmara today. At RITMO, we have accepted that “hybrid mode” will be the new normal. So also for disputations. Fortunately, we had already many years of experience with video conferencing before the corona crisis hit. We have also gained lots of experience by running the Music, Communication and Technology master’s programme for some years. In another blog post, I summarized some experiences of running our first hybrid disputation....
It is challenging to find good illustrations to use in presentations and papers. For that reason, I hope to help others by sharing some of the illustrations I have made myself. I will share them with a permissive license (CC-BY) to be easily reused for various purposes. I start with the “puzzle” that I often use in presentations about Open Research. It outlines some of the various parts of the research process and how they can be made (more) open....
Earlier this year, I wrote about my 23 tips to improve your web presence. Those tips were meant to encourage academics to care about how their employee web pages look at universities. Such pages look different from university to university. Still, in most places, they contain an image and some standard information on the top, followed by more or less structured information further down. For reference, this is an explanation of how my employee page is built up:...
My new book will be published Open Access, and I also aim only to use open-source tools as part of the writing process. The most challenging has been to figure out how to make nice-looking illustrations. Parts of the book are based on the Ph.D. dissertation that I wrote a long time ago. I wrote that on a MacBook and made all the illustrations in OmniGraffle. While it was quite easy to make the switch to Ubuntu in general, OmniGraffle has been one of the few programs I have really missed in the Linux world....
Ever since I finished my dissertation in 2007, I have thought about writing it up as a book. Parts of the dissertation were translated and extended in the Norwegian-language textbook Musikk og bevegelse (which, by the way, is out of print but freely available as an ebook). That book focused primarily on music-related body motion and was written for the course MUS2006 at the University of Oslo. However, my action-sound theory was only partially mentioned and never properly presented in a book format....
Many people rely on what I will call linear presentation tools when they lecture. This includes software such as LibreOffice Impress, Google Presentation, MS PowerPoint, or Keynote. These tools are great for smooth, timed, linear lectures. I also use them from time to time, but mainly if I know exactly what to say. They are also good when I lecture with others, and we need to develop a presentation together. However, linear presentation tools do not work equally well for general teaching, where spontaneity is required....
This year’s Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Conference has opened for virtual lab tours. When we cannot travel to visit each other, this is a great way to showcase how things look and what we are working on. Stefano Fasciani and I teamed up a couple of weeks ago to walk around some of the labs and studios at the Department of Musicology and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion....