Music

I am happy to announce a new publication titled How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications (PDF of preprint), published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. The paper is based on the Sverm project, and was written and accepted two years ago. Sometimes academic publishing takes absurdly long, which this is an example of, but I am happy that the publication is finally out in the wild....

From 2007 to 2011 I had a part-time research position at the Norwegian Academy of Music in a project called New Instruments for Musical Exploration, and with the acronym NIME. This project was also the reason why I ended up organising the NIME conference in Oslo in 2011. The NIME project focused on creating an environment for musical innovation at the Norwegian Academy of Music, through exploring the design of new physical and electronic instruments....

I am happy to announce that fourMs researcher Kristian Nymoen has successfully defended his PhD dissertation, and that the dissertation is now available in the DUO archive. I have had the pleasure of co-supervising Kristian’s project, and also to work closely with him on several of the papers included in the dissertation (and a few others). Reference K. Nymoen. Methods and Technologies for Analysing Links Between Musical Sound and Body Motion....

I am happy to announce that the dissertation of one my master students has just been made available in the DUO archive: Catherine Støver: Freestyle Dressage : an equipage riding to music Catherine wrote about the importance and influence of music in freestyle dressage. Most of my students are working on more music technological topics, and I can clearly say that supervising Catherine was both fun and a great learning experience for myself....

Here is a little plug for the submission deadline for this year’s NIME conference. I usually don’t write so much about deadlines here, but as the current chairof the international steering committee for the conference series, I feel that I should do my share in helping to spread the word. The NIME conference is a great place to meet academics, designers, technologists, and artists, all working on creating weird instruments and music....

Yesterday, I performed with the Norwegian Noise Orchestra at Betong in Oslo, at a concert organised by Dans for Voksne. The orchestra is an ad-hoc group of noisy improvisers, and I immediately felt at home. The performance lasted for 12 hours, from noon to midnight, and I performed for two hours in the afternoon. For the performance I used my Soniperforma patch based on the sonifyer technique and the Jamoma module I developed a couple of years ago (jmod....

I am currently in beautiful Aldeburgh, a small town on the east coast of England, teaching at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme together with Rolf Wallin and Tansy Davies. This post is mainly to summarise the things I have been going through, and provide links for various things. Theoretical stuff My introductory lectures went through some of the theory of an embodied understanding of the experience of music. One aspect of this theory that I find very relevant for the development of interactive works is what I call action-sound relationships....

One thing that has occurred to me over recent years, is how the new international trend of developing music controllers and instruments, as for example most notably seen at the annual NIME conferences, challenges many traditional roles in music. A traditional Western view has been that of a clear separation between instrument constructor, musician and composer. The idea has been that the constructor makes the instrument, the composer makes the score, the performer plays the score with the instrument, and the perceiver experiences the performance, as illustrated in the figure below....

A couple of days ago I presented the paper “Motion-sound Interaction Using Sonification based on Motiongrams” at the ACHI 2012 conference in Valencia, Spain. The paper is actually based on a Jamoma module that I developed more than a year ago, but due to other activities it took a while before I managed to write it up as a paper. See below for the full paper and video examples. The Paper Download paper (PDF 2MB) Abstract: The paper presents a method for sonification of human body motion based on motiongrams....

Together with Victoria Johnson I have developed the piece Transformation, a piece where we are using video analysis to control sound selection and spatialisation. We have been developing the setup and piece during the last couple of years, and performed variations of the piece at MIC, the Opera house and at the music academy last year. The piece will be performed again today, Monday 28 March 2011 at 19:00 at the Norwegian Academy of Music....