1 January this year, I set out to record one sound action per day. The idea was to test out the action–sound theory from my book Sound Actions. One thing is writing about action–sound couplings and mappings, another is to see how the theory works with real-world examples. As I commented on after one month, the project has been both challenging and inspiring. Below I write about some of my experiences but first, here is the complete list:...
I am doing some end of the year cleaning on my hard drive and just uploaded the Jupyter Notebook I used in the analysis of a mobile phone lying still earlier this year. For some future studies, I thought it would be interesting to explore the PDF export functionality from Jupyter. That worked very well except for that I didn’t get any title or author name on top: Then I found a solution on Stack Overflow....
I came across an interesting blog post by Alex Chen on how to write better image descriptions for web pages. They propose an “object-action-context” approach when writing image descriptions. I see that such an approach could also be helpful for my sound actions project. Adding better descriptions I am soon getting to the end of my year-long project of recording one sound action daily. A sound action is a multimodal entity consisting of body motion and its resultant sound....
As mentioned yesterday, the source files for the illustrations in my Sound Actions book are available on GitHub in the form of LibreOffice Draw files (ODG). Draw may be less powerful but much easier to work with than more advanced line art software, such as Inkscape. One of the nice things about the LibreOffice package is its scripting possibilities. While working on my book, I wrote a shell script that would read all the ODG files in a folder and convert them to PDF and PNG files:...
Last week, my book was published by the MIT Press, and I am happy to announce that the source code is available on GitHub. Most people are probably mainly interested in the content of the book. If so, you should grab a free copy of the final version. This blog post explains why I have made the source code available. License I was fortunate to secure funding from the University of Oslo to make the book freely available, what is often referred to as Open Access....
There has been much discussion about ChatGPT recently, a chat robot that can write meaningful answers to questions. I haven’t had time to test it out properly, and it was unavailable when I wanted to check it today. Instead, I have played around with YouWrite, a service that can write text based on limited input. I thought it would be interesting to ask it to write about something I know well, so I asked it to write a text based on an abbreviated version of the abstract of my new book:...
I am happy to announce that my book Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments is now published! I am also thrilled that this is an open access book, meaning that is free to download and read. You are, of course, also welcome to pick up a paper copy! Here is a quick video summary of the book’s content: In the book, I combine perspectives from embodied music cognition and interactive music technology....
I have previously written about how to resize all the images in a folder. That script was based on lossy compression of the files. However, there are also tools for optimizing image files losslessly. One approach is to use the.jpgoptim](https://github.com/tjko.jpgoptim) function available on ubuntu. Here is an excellent explanation of how it works. Lossless optimization As part of moving my blog to Hugo, I took the opportunity to optimize all the images in all my image folders....
Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There I introduced a figure that I regularly receive permission requests to republish (which I always give, in the spirit of open research). The challenge with the previous blog post has been that I based my figure on a combination of a textual description by Stember and a more limited figure by Zeigler....
I have been running my blog with a self-hosted WordPress install for almost two decades, and I finally decided to move to a static website solution. The relatively rapid shift was triggered by a WordPress update that caused trouble with the paths to images throughout my blog. However, since my site was hacked a couple of years ago, I have pondered alternative solutions for running the blog. I have been tired of all the updates and security issues with a server-based content management system and figured that a static website solution would be more straightforward in the long run....