Posts

I participated in the conference The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century at the Department of Musicology the last couple of days. Judith Lochhead started her keynote lecture with a clip from the movie The art of flying by Jan van Ijken. This is a beautiful short film based on clips of flocking birds: The art of flying from Jan van IJken on Vimeo. Of course, I wanted to see how some video visualizations would work, so I reached for the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python....

I use a GoPro Max 360-degree camera in my annual #StillStanding project. That means that I also have had an excellent chance to work with GoPro files and try to understand their inner logic. In this blog post, I will summarize some of my findings. What is recorded? Recording “a video” with a GoPro Max results in recording multiple files. For example, each of my daily 10-minute recordings ends up with something like this:...

I have been exploring different video visualizations as part of my annual stillstanding project. Some of these I post as part of my daily Mastodon updates, while others I only test for future publications. Most of the video visualizations and analyses are made with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and structured as Jupyter Notebooks. I have been pondering whether skipping frames is a good idea. The 360-degree videos that I create visualizations from are shot at 25 fps....

Musique de Table is a wonderful piece written by Thierry de Mey. I have seen it performed live several times, and here came across a one-shot video recording that I thought it would be interesting to analyse: The test with some video visualization tools in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. For running the commands below, you first need to import the toolbox in Python: import musicalgestures as mg I started the process by importing the source video:...

At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities....

Today marks the 100th day of my annual #StillStanding project. In this blog post, I summarize some of my experiences so far. Endurance Some people questioned whether I would be able to stand still every single day for an entire year. But, hey, it is only ten minutes (out of 1440) per day, and even though my life as a centre director is busy, it is always possible to find time for a standstill sometime during the day....

Sometimes it is necessary to check, remove or modify the metadata of PDF files. Here is a quick post to show how it can be done in the terminal on Ubuntu Checking PDF metadata Most PDF viewers have an option for showing the metadata of PDF files. This can also be done in the terminal using the “pdfinfo” command-line tool. First, we need to install the “poppler-utils” package: sudo apt install poppler-utils Once installed, you can check the metadata by using the following command:...

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording 360 videos with audio and sensor data while standing still for 10 minutes. I have started exploring how to visualize the sensor data best. Today, I am looking into visualization strategies for 360-degree images. I have written about how to pre-process 360-degree videos from Garmin VIRB and Ricoh Theta cameras previously. The Theta records in a dual fisheye format like this:...

What is the difference between sound and audio? I often hear people confuse the terms. Here are a couple of ways of thinking about the difference. A good summary can be found in this blog post: Sound is vibrations through materials Audio is the technology to hear sounds coming from natural or human-made sources Another good definition is that audio is electrical energy (active or potential) that represents sound. From this, a sound recording is stored as an audio file....

I am happy to announce a new online course from RITMO: Pupillometry – The Eye as a Window Into the Mind. This is the third so-called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) I have been part of making, following Motion Capture and Music Moves. I am excited to get it started on Monday, 16 January. Discover the applications of pupillometry research Pupillometry is a relatively new research method within the sciences, and it has wide-ranging applications within psychology, neuroscience, and beyond....