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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 have been pondering the term “creativity” lately. Creativity is a term that “everybody” knows but nobody manages to define. Here, I will describe how I came up with my current definition of creativity as the ability to create something novel and meaningful. Defining creativity The American Psychological Association (APA) defines creativity as: the ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. They focus on creation through (new) production or development....

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....

I have generally been very happy about moving my blog to Hugo, except that I have struggled with getting it properly indexed with Google, Bing, etc. One of the benefits of using standard WordPress is that it comes with a lot of automatic functions for such things. In theory, that should also happen with Hugo. However, for some reason, my blog did not work. After various trials and errors, I think I am getting on the right track....

Today is midsummer, and with that I enter “summer mode”. A year ago, I wrote about why I chose to make an explanatory tripnote. Nowadays, most people are never really offline. Still, we all need time off. For me, that includes doing many things that I don’t typically have time to during the busy semesters. I received many positive comments on my tripnote last year, so I decided to make another this year....

I have had some interesting discussions about what constitutes metadata these days. What is really the difference between metadata and data? While participating in ESOF today, I came across the term paradata, which was new to me. What is that, and how does it differ from data and metadata? Data Data refers to raw facts, observations, measurements, or representations of information in various formats, such as numbers, text, images, audio, or video....

There is an increasing focus on making data openly available, or at least archived according to the FAIR principles. This has also led to the need for more knowledge and skills in data management at all levels. For some, this is becoming a career path on its own. That was the topic of the panel session “Fostering the emergence of new research data careers” I moderated at EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF2024) in Katowice, Poland, today....

At the last meeting of EUA’s Open Science Expert Group, we discussed the need for data to be “born” FAIR. What does that entail? FAIR data Just a recap: For data to be openly available (what is often called Open Data), they also need to be FAIR, which stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. However, not all FAIR data needs to be open. At RITMO, we often find that we need to protect data due to copyright and/or privacy reasons....

I am happy to announce the publication of the anthology Sonic Design- Explorations Between Art and Science.This 17-chapter volume explores sonic design practice and theory and celebrates the lifelong achievements of Professor Rolf Inge Godøy. The anthology is based on selected contributions at the International Seminar on Sonic Design, which took place in May 2022. The seminar was set up to celebrate Rolf Inge Godøy, my former supervisor, mentor, colleague and friend, uphon his retirement....