Music

This week I presented the paper NIME and the Environment: Toward a More Sustainable NIME Practice at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in Shanghai/online with Raul Masu, Adam Pultz Melbye, and John Sullivan. Below is our 3-minute video summary of the paper. And here is the abstract: This paper addresses environmental issues around NIME research and practice. We discuss the formulation of an environmental statement for the conference as well as the initiation of a NIME Eco Wiki containing information on environmental concerns related to the creation of new musical instruments....

We presented the installation Strings On-Line at NIME 2020. It was supposed to be a physical installation at the conference to be held in Birmingham, UK. Due to the corona crisis, the conference went online, and we decided to redesign the proposed physical installation into an online installation instead. The installation ran continuously from 21-25 July last year, and hundreds of people “came by” to interact with it. I finally got around to edit a short (1-minute) video promo of the installation:...

A piano is an instrument. So is a violin. But what about the voice? Or a fork? Or a mobile phone? So what is (really) a musical instrument? That was the title of a short lecture I held at UiO’s Open Day today. The 15-minute lecture is a very quick version of some of the concepts I have been working on for a new book project. Here I present a model for understanding what a musical instrument is and how new technology changes how we make and experience music....

I came across a fantastic performance of a Bach prelude played on Boomwhackers by Les Objets Volants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5seI0eJZCg It is really incredible how they manage to coordinate the sticks and make it into a beautiful performance. Given my interest in the visual aspects of music performance, I reached for the Musical Gestures Toolbox to create some video visualisations. I started with creating an average image of the video: This image is not particularly interesting....

I am happy to announce a new run (the 6th) of our free online course Music Moves: Why Does Music Make You Move?. Here is a 1-minute welcome video: The course starts on Monday (25 January 2021) and will run for six weeks. In the course, you will learn about the psychology of music and movement, and how researchers study music-related movements, with this free online course. We developed the course 5 years ago, but the content is still valid....

Last week I was interviewed about music and artificial intelligence (AI). This led to several different stories on radio, TV, and as text. The reason for the sudden media interest in this topic was a story by The Guardian on the use of deep learning for creating music. They featured an example of the creation of Sinatra-inspired music made using a deep learning algorithm: After these stories were published, I was asked about participating in a talk-show on Friday evening....

After several years of hard work, we are very happy to announce a new publication coming out of the MICRO project that I am leading: Headphones or Speakers? An Exploratory Study of Their Effects on Spontaneous Body Movement to Rhythmic Music (Frontiers Psychology). This is the first journal article of my PhD student Agata Zelechowska, and it reports on a standstill study conducted a couple of years ago. It is slightly different than the paradigm we have used for the Championships of Standstill....

I am a big supporter of Open Access publishing, but for various reasons some of my publications are not openly available by default. This is the case for the chapter Methods for Studying Music-Related Body Motion that I have contributed to the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology. I am very happy to announce that the embargo on the book ran out today, which means that a pre-print version of my chapter is finally freely available in UiO’s digital repository....

My PhD student Cagri Erdem developed a performance together with dancer Katja Henriksen Schia. The piece was first performed together with Qichao Lan and myself during the RITMO opening and also during MusicLab vol. 3. See here for a teaser of the performance: This week Cagri, Katja and myself performed a version of the piece Vrengt at NIME in Porto Alegre. We also presented a paper describing the development of the instrument/piece:...

I am happy to announce a new journal article coming out of the MICRO project: Victor E. Gonzalez-Sanchez, Agata Zelechowska and Alexander Refsum Jensenius Correspondences Between Music and Involuntary Human Micromotion During Standstill Front. Psychol., 07 August 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01382 Abstract: The relationships between human body motion and music have been the focus of several studies characterizing the correspondence between voluntary motion and various sound features. The study of involuntary movement to music, however, is still scarce....