Posts

I have never thought about how so-called plug-in-power microphones actually work. Over the years, I have used several of them for various applications, including small lavalier microphones for cameras and mobile phones. The nice thing about plug-and-play devices is that they are, well, plug and play. The challenge, however, is when they don’t work. Then it is time to figure out what is going on. This is the story of how I managed to use a Røde SmartLav+ lavalier microphone with a Zoom Q8 recorder....

I take a lot of timelapse shots with a GoPro camera. Usually, I do this with the camera’s photo setting instead of the video setting. That is because I find it easier to delete unwanted pictures from the series that way. It also simplifies selecting individual photos when I want that. But then I need a way to create a timelapse video from the photos easily. Here is an FFmpeg one-liner that does the job:...

A few days after Agata Zelechowska defended her PhD dissertation, we got the news that her last paper was finally published in Music & Science. It is titled Who Moves to Music? Empathic Concern Predicts Spontaneous Movement Responses to Rhythm and Music and was co-authored by Victor Gonzalez Sanchez, Bruno Laeng, Jonna Vuoskoski, and myself. The paper is based on Agata’s headphones-speakers experiment. We have previously published a paper showing that people move more when listening on headphones....

Yesterday, I wrote about Agata Zelechowska’s disputation. We decided to run it as a hybrid production, even though there was no audience present. It would, of course, have been easier to run it as an online-only event. However, we expect that hybrid is the new “normal” for such events, and therefore thought that it would be good to get started exploring the hybrid format right away. In this blog post, I will write up some of our experiences....

I am happy to announce that Agata Zelechowska yesterday successfully defended her PhD dissertation during a public disputation. The dissertation is titled Irresistible Movement: The Role of Musical Sound, Individual Differences and Listening Context in Movement Responses to Music and has been carried out as part of my MICRO project at RITMO. The dissertation is composed of five papers and an extended introduction. The abstract reads: This dissertation examines the phenomenon of spontaneous movement responses to music....

Citizen Science is on everyone’s lips these days, at least on the lips of people working in research administration, funding agencies and in institutional leadership. As a member of the EUA Expert Group on Open Science/Science 2.0, I am also involved in ongoing discussions on the topic. Yesterday, I took part in the workshop Citizen Science in an institutional context organized by EUA and OpenAire. A recording of my talk is available here:...

A couple of days ago, I read an interesting paper about a new AI algorithm that can summarize long texts. This is an attempt to solve the problem of tl;dr texts, meaning “too long, didn’t read”. The article reminded me that the same problem exists for music, in which case it would probably be tl;dl: “too long, didn’t listen”. I was interested in this topic back when I wrote my master’s thesis about short-term music recognition....

Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same....

Last week I was interviewed about music and artificial intelligence (AI). This led to several different stories on radio, TV, and as text. The reason for the sudden media interest in this topic was a story by The Guardian on the use of deep learning for creating music. They featured an example of the creation of Sinatra-inspired music made using a deep learning algorithm: After these stories were published, I was asked about participating in a talk-show on Friday evening....

FFmpeg is a fantastic resource for doing all sorts of video manipulations from the terminal. However, it has a lot of features, and it is not always easy to understand what they all mean. I was interested in understanding more about how the tblend function works. This is a function that blends successive frames in 30 different ways. To get a visual understanding of how the different operations work, I decided to try them all out on the same video file....