I have been discussing definitions of the terms motion/movement, action and gesture several times before on this blog (for example here and here). Here is a summary of my current take on these three concepts: Motion: displacement of an object in space over time. This object could be a hand, a foot, a mobile phone, a rod, whatever. Motion is an objective entity, and can be recorded with a motion capture system....
](/images/2012/10/image2.jpg) Last week I held a keynote lecture at the Norwegian music technology conference Musikkteknologidagene, by (and at) the Norwegian Academy of Music and NOTAM. The talk was titled: “Embodying the human body in music technology”, and was an attempt at explaining why I believe we need to put more emphasis on human-friendly technologies, and why the field of music cognition is very much connected to that of music technology....
By coincidence, I have had several discussions about footnotes, endnotes, and different types of citation styles recently. Such discussions often end up in “religious” wars, in which researchers from different disciplines argue why “their” system is the best. I often find myself agreeing with none or everyone in such discussions since I work in and between several disciplines (the arts, humanities, technology, psychology, medicine) and publish my work in journals that use different ways of handling citations and notes....
For the last couple of years I have been involved in an artistic research project called Sverm, in which we investigate the artistic potential of bodily micromovements and microsound. We are currently working towards a series of intimate lab performances in the end of November. As a side-project to the performances, we are also working with video artist Lavasir Nordrum, on the making of four short videos documenting the four main parts of the project: micromovement, microsound, excitation, resonance....
I am currently working on some extensions to my motiongram-sonifyer, and came across this beautiful little film by Norman McLaren from 1940: The sounds heard in the film are entirely synthetic, created by drawing in the sound-track part of the film. McLaren explained this a 1951 BBC interview: I draw a lot of little lines on the sound-track area of the 35-mm. film. Maybe 50 or 60 lines for every musical note....
I am happy to announce that the ZigFlea board is currently available from Seedstudio. This board is the result of the Master’s thesis of Øyvind Hauback, whom I co-supervised at fourMs. The main point of the board is to provide an easy way of using ZigBee wireless communication together with Dan Overholt’s CUI32Stem sensor interface. ](/images/2012/09/P2171169.jpg) The ZigFlea wireless board, as sold from Seedstudio. The board is described in Øyvind’s thesis (in Norwegian), as well as in short form (and English) in our NIME 2012 paper....
I am currently in beautiful Aldeburgh, a small town on the east coast of England, teaching at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme together with Rolf Wallin and Tansy Davies. This post is mainly to summarise the things I have been going through, and provide links for various things. Theoretical stuff My introductory lectures went through some of the theory of an embodied understanding of the experience of music. One aspect of this theory that I find very relevant for the development of interactive works is what I call action-sound relationships....
Over the years we have uploaded various videos to YouTube of our fourMs lab activities. Some of these videos have been uploaded using a shared YouTube user, others by myself and others. I just realised that a good solution for gathering all the different videos is just to create a playlist, and then add all relevant videos there. Then it should also be possible to embed this playlist in web pages, like below:
One thing that has occurred to me over recent years, is how the new international trend of developing music controllers and instruments, as for example most notably seen at the annual NIME conferences, challenges many traditional roles in music. A traditional Western view has been that of a clear separation between instrument constructor, musician and composer. The idea has been that the constructor makes the instrument, the composer makes the score, the performer plays the score with the instrument, and the perceiver experiences the performance, as illustrated in the figure below....
I was in Hamburg last week, teaching at the International Summer Shool in Systematic Musicology (ISSSM). While there, I was able to test a newly acquired high-speed video camera (Phantom V711) at the Department of Musicology. ](/images/2012/08/2012-08-08-DSCN4127.jpg) The beautiful building of the Department of Musicology in Hamburg. ](/images/2012/08/2012-08-09-DSCN4152.jpg) They have some really cool drawings in the ceiling at the entrance of the Department of Musicology in Hamburg. Master student Niko Plath was friendly enough to set aside some time to set up the system and do a test recording....