Action

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....

One month has passed of the year and my sound action project. I didn’t know how it would develop when I started and have found it both challenging and inspiring. It has also engaged people around me more than I had expected. Each day I upload one new video recording to YouTube and post a link on Twitter. If you want to look at the whole collection, it is probably better to check out this playlist:...

Yesterday, I presented my microinteraction paper here at the NIME conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), organised at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Today I am presenting a poster based on a paper written together with two of my colleagues at UiO. Title MuMYO - Evaluating and Exploring the MYO Armband for Musical Interaction Authors Kristian Nymoen, Mari Romarheim Haugen, Alexander Refsum Jensenius **Abstract **The MYO armband from Thalmic Labs is a complete and wireless motion and muscle sensing platform....

This week I am participating at the NIME conference, organised at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am doing some administrative work as chair of the NIME steering committee, and I am also happy to present a paper tomorrow: Title To Gesture or Not? An Analysis of Terminology in NIME Proceedings 2001–2013 Links Paper (PDF) Presentation (HTML) Spreadsheet with summary of data (ODS) OSX shell script used for analysis Abstract The term ‘gesture’ has represented a buzzword in the NIME community since the beginning of its conference series....

My paper titled An action–sound approach to teaching interactive music has recently been published by Organised Sound. The paper is based on some of the theoretical ideas on action-sound couplings developed in my PhD, combined with how I designed the course Interactive Music based on such an approach to music technology. **Abstract **The conceptual starting point for an `action-sound approach’ to teaching music technology is the acknowledgment of the couplings that exist in acoustic instruments between sounding objects, sound-producing actions and the resultant sounds themselves....

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....