Motion

Students in musicology, music cognition and technology should consider ISSSM 2007: Following on the success of the first international summer school in systematic musicology (ISSSM 2006), the summer school will be held for the second time at IPEM, the research centre of the Department of Musicology of Ghent University (Belgium). This year courses will focus on current topics in the research field such as embodied music cognition, music information retrieval and music and interactive media....

Strange that I didn’t see this before. Apparently, W3C has made a draft for multimodal annotation called EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. The abstract of the document reads: The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input....

Yesterday, Jeroen Arendsen introduced me to the concept of fidgeting, the stuff that happens in between actions/gestures in a continuous flux of movement. I have been looking for a good word to describe this type of movement (which I have been calling “movement-noise”), and I am happy to finally have a better word for it. I made a small sketch showing how fidgeting fits into my movement-flux diagram to celebrate the new discovery:...

Ok, so I have been discussing the concepts of movement, action and gesture with various people since I posted this entry, and I have come to disagree with myself. Marcelo pointed out that an action doesn’t necessarily have to involve a movement, as touch and other types of manipulation should also be considered an action. After all, holding down the keys on a piano after the attack results in no movement, but it is certainly an action....

Just to clarify: I am using action to denote chunks of movement: {width=“550”} Action is thus highly subjective, it is just a mental construct (for either the performer or perceiver, or both) of chunks in the continuous flux of movement. Acknowledging the fact that our brain is working at multiple speeds and resolutions, there could also be actions that are chunks of smaller actions. It is these actions (i.e. movement chunks) that will be the basis for gestures (i....

Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit....

{.imagelink}NOVINT has finally got around to release Falcon the much awaited first, cheap haptic controller. I have my doubts about how solid the thing is, at least when I know how fragile the many times more expensive Phantoms are. Nevertheless, Falcon will finally introduce haptics to everyone.

What I find most fascinating about Apple’s new iPhone, is the shift from buttons to body. Getting away from the paradigm of pressing buttons to make a call or to navigate, the iPhone boasts a large multi-touch screen where the user will be able to interact by pointing at pictures and objects. Furthermore, the built-in rotation sensor will sense the direction of the device and rotate the screen accordingly, somehow similar to how new digital cameras rotate the pictures you take automatically....

Gregory Taylor has made an interview with Tim Place about Hipno. It is interesting how he comments about the Hipnoscope control: The Hipnoscope does something that I’m quite proud of, which is that it allows you to quickly audition a plug-in and some of its possibilities. But at the same time it really rewards those who are patient explorers that spend time really focusing on subtleties offers. I still find myself surprised at the results I get sometimes - the Hipnoscope creates this palette where there is an almost infinite range of subtlety with some of the plug-ins....

I am working on the theory chapter of my dissertation, and am trying to pin down some terminology. For a long time I have been using the concept of gesture-sound relationships to denote the intimate links between a physical movement and the resultant sound. However, since I am throwing away gesture for now, I also need to reconsider the rest of my vocabulary. Hodgins (2004) uses the term music-movement structural correspondences, which I find problematic since it places music first....