After working with music-related movements for some years, and thereby arguing that movement is an integral part of music, I tend to react when people use “music” as a synonym for either “score” or “sound”. I certainly agree that sound is an important part of music, and that scores (if they exist) are related to both musical sound and music in general. But I do not agree that music is sound....
Over the last year I have been working on a text book based on my dissertation. It started out as a translation of my dissertation into Norwegian, but I quickly realized that an educational text is much more useful. So in practice I have written a totally new book, although it is drawing on research from my dissertation. The title of the book is Musikk og bevegelse (Music and movement) and that is exactly what it is about....
Jyri Pakarinen just presented a paper on the Virtual Slide Guitar (VSG) here at NIME in Genova. They used a commercial 6DOF head tracking solution from Naturalpoint called TrackIR 4 Pro. The manufacturer promises: Experience real time 3D view control in video games and simulations just by moving your head! The only true 6DOF head tracking system of its kind. TrackIR takes your PC gaming to astonishing new levels of realism and immersion!...
Seems like the new MT9 format, or Music 2.0 as the company Audizen calls it, is all over the news these days. The idea is simple, and has been explored for years in the research community: distribute multichannel audio, so that the end user can have control over the single tracks. The problem of course is to make this into a standard, and I see many challenges in how this could be implemented:...
Last week I presented the paper Some Challenges Related to Music and Movement in Mobile Music Technology at the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. A PDF of the paper is available here. Not sure if the abstract justifies the fairly dense paper, but at least it is compact. Mobile music technology opens many new opportunities in terms of location-aware systems, social interaction etc., but we should not forget that many challenges faced in ”immobile” music technology research are also apparent in mobile computing....
I am doing some “house-cleaning” on my computer, and came across the link to the OLPC Sound Samples which were announced last month. This collection covers a lot of different sounds, ranging from the Berklee samples to sets created by people in the CSound community. Obviously, not all the 10GB is equally interesting, but the initiative is excellent, and along with the Freesound project, it makes a great resource for various projects....
In a presentation at the Society for Music Theory 2002 Conference, 2002, David Huron proposed 21 listening modes: Distracted listening Tangential listening Metaphysical listening Signal listening Sing-along listening Lyric listening Programmatic listening Allusive listening Reminiscent listening Identity listening Retentive listening Fault listening Feature listening Innovation listening Memory scan listening Directed listening Distance listening Ecstatic listening Emotional listening Kinesthetic listening Performance listening and he concludes: “This list is not intended to be exhaustive....
The location of the EyesWeb Week is the facilities of the DIST group in the beautiful Casa Paganina, including a large auditorium next to the laboratories. This allows for an ecological setting for experiments, since performers can actually perform on a real stage with real audience. I wish we could have something like this in Oslo! Here a picture from an experimental setup where we are looking at the synchronisation between the musicians in a string trio....
The Peretz group has made available a set of musical excerpts with emotion ratings. Perhaps not the most exciting musical collection, but I think it is very important that the community starts building some data sets that can be used as reference for various type of analyses. We really need to create a set of music recordings including motion capture and video, but this first requires that we develop some common format that can be used for synchronisation and sharing....
I just heard Esteban Maestre from UPF present his project on creating a database of instrumental actions of bowed instruments, for use in the synthesis of score-based material. They have come up with a very interesting solution to the recording and synchronisation of audio with movement data: Building a VST plugin which implements recording of motion capture data from a Polhemus Liberty, together with bow sensing through an Arduino. This makes it possible to load the VST-plugin inside regular audio sequencing software and do the recording from there....