Posts

For my year-long StillStanding project I am generating videograms for all the scenes. Since there is not much motion in these 10-minute recordings, they typically look like stripes. Looking at today’s recording of an unspectacular hotel room in Kongsberg, I noticed how different the horizontal and vertical videogram look: It is fascinating how two averages of the same video recording can be so different. The explanation is simple; they are based on averaging in two different dimensions (horizontal and vertical)....

People often refer to “sound and video” as a concept pair. That is confusing because, in my thinking, “sound” and “video” refer to very different things. In this post, I will explain the difference. Sound and Audio In a previous blog post, I have written about the difference between sound and audio. The short story is that “sound” refers to the physical phenomenon of vibrating molecules, such as sound waves moving through air....

Today, I am halfway through my year-long #StillStanding project. Not so much has changed since I summed up the first 100 days. I still enjoy the experience, and there are new things to learn every day. Here is a 10-minute video I have recorded that presents the project, explains its rationale, and reflects upon some experiences so far: The biggest challenge moving forward is finding new spaces every day. I have already stood in the most accessible spaces, so I need to spend more time looking for unexplored rooms both at the university and close to my home....

I read somewhere (but never stored the link) that people should add a more lengthy description in their trip notes (or vacation messages or whatever people call it) and decided to try it. Usually, I have only added a very brief message about when I return, but I think the point of adding a longer one is to explain why one cannot be as accessible as one usually may be....

I’m sitting in my office, listening to the noisy ventilation system that inspired my AMBIENT project. Here is a short sample: At the moment, I am primarily focusing on completing my book Still Standing. However, as part of my year-long #StillStanding project, I have also started thinking about the sounds found in indoor environments. Asking ChatGPT for help I have yet to begin a proper literature review on ventilation noise, but as a start, I asked ChatGPT for help....

I have used “barefoot shoes” for more than a decade. Only occasionally, I wear something else. It started with a pair of Vibram five fingers, but after family complaints about the weird-looking toes, I moved on to various types of “normal” minimalistic shoes, such as the ones from Vivo Barefoot. Yesterday, I wore a pair of Birkenstock sandals and immediately noticed how strange it felt when I started my daily standstill session....

I have been running Python-based Jupyter Notebooks for some time but never thought about using environments before quite recently. I have heard people talking about environments, but I didn’t understand why I would need it. Two days ago, I tried to upgrade to the latest version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and got stuck in a dependency nightmare. I tried to upgrade one of the packages that choked, but that only led to other packages breaking....

Today, I stood still in a meeting room with an oddly ticking clock. This was part of my annual #StillStanding project which is documented on my Mastodon channel. There was nothing special about today’s session but the clock. The meeting room was furnished with a large table in the middle, a screen on the wall, and glass walls on both sides. The large ventilation system led to a noticeable low-frequency “hum” dominating the soundscape....

I have previously written about the coauthorship exercise that we use at RITMO workshops when we have new groups of doctoral and postdoctoral fellows. Another concept we use from time to time is what we call a “confession workshop.” This builds on the fact that a researcher’s life is often filled with rejections and discouraging feedback. Too often, we only talk about successful stories, giving the skewed impression that there are no challenges in academia....

I have previously written about the different publication cultures at RITMO. This includes different coauthorship traditions between our disciplines: musicology, psychology, and informatics. Our approach to avoid conflicts over (co)authorship is to discuss it often. We also have an exercise that we run occasionally at retreats. Since this may be a topic of interest to others, here I share the case we have developed. We typically allocate an hour for the exercise and split people into small groups (4–6 people) from different disciplines....