Audio

Researchers from AIST have released an open database of dance videos, and I got very excited to try out some visualization methods on some of the files. This was also a good chance to test out some new functionality in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab that we are developing at RITMO. The AIST collection contains a number of videos. I selected one hip-hop dance video based on a very steady rhythmic pattern, and a contemporary dance video that is more fluid in both motion and music....

We just started a new run of our free online course Music Moves. Here we have a tradition of recording wrap-up videos every Friday, in which some of the course educators answer questions from the learners. We have recorded these in many different ways, from using high-end cameras and microphones to just using a handheld phone. We have found that using multiple cameras and microphones is too time-consuming, both in setup and editing....

I have been interviewing a lot of people for various types of university positions over the years. Most often these interviews are conducted using a video-conferencing system. Here I provide some tips to help people prepare for a video-based job interview: We (and many others) typically use Skype for interviews, not because it is the best system out there (of commercial platforms I prefer Zoom), but because it is the most widespread solution....

I was invited to talk about my experiences with flipped classroom methodologies at a seminar at the Faculty of Humanities last week. Preparing for the talk got me to revisit my own journey of working towards flipped teaching methodologies. This has also involved explorations of various types of audio/video recording. I will go through them in chronological order. Podcasting Back in 2009-2011, I created “podcasts” of my lectures a couple of semesters, such as in the course MUS2006 Music and Body Movements (which was at the time taught in Norwegian)....

I spend a lot of time walking around the city with my daughter these days, and have been wondering how much I move and how the movement is distributed over time. To answer these questions, and to try out a method for easy and cheap motion capture, I decided to record today’s walk to the playground. I could probably have recorded the accelerometer data in my phone, but I wanted to try an even more low-tech solution: an audio recorder....

I am teaching a course in sound theory this semester, and therefore thought it was time to update a little program I developed several years ago, called SoundAnalysis. While there are many excellent sound analysis programs out there (SonicVisualiser, Praat, etc.), they all work on pre-recorded sound material. That is certainly the best approach to sound analysis, but it is not ideal in a pedagogical setting where you want to explain things in realtime....

Earlier this year I wrote a post about how I was going to try out podcasting during the course MUS2006 Musikk og bevegelse this spring semester. As I am preparing for new courses this fall, now is the time to evaluate my podcasting experience, and decide on whether I am going to continue doing this. Why podcasting? The first question I should ask myself is why I would be interested in setting up a podcast from my lectures?...

I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use....

To allow everyone to watch their own synchronised spectrograms and motiongrams, I have made a small application called AudioVideoAnalysis. Download AudioVideoAnalysis for OS X (8MB) It currently has the following features: Draws a spectrogram from any connected microphone Draws a motiongram/videogram from any connected camera Press the escape button to toggle fullscreen mode Built with Max/MSP by Cycling ‘74 on OS X.5. I will probably make a Windows version at some point, but haven’t gotten that far yet....

Last week I performed my master exam concert at the Department of Music and Theatre, University of Oslo. The program consisted of improvisations for piano and live electronics. Different MIDI, audio, and video processing techniques were used. Here I describe the different pieces. Performa It is incredible how many exciting sounds one can get from a piano, and mallets are a nice change from playing on the keys. The computer helps with temporal adjustments and background sounds....