Research

Usually, we use the word listener when describing the perceiver in a musical context. This, however, does not fit well with the premise of my research which is that music cognition is multimodal in nature. I am reluctant to use the word listener, since it favours listening over the other modalities. The composite spectator-listener (as used by Fells in this paper) includes both the auditory and visual modalities, and is much better than only listener but still lacks the other modalities....

Yesterday, someone commented that improvisation is all about being able to play some random stuff, in realtime. My experience is really the opposite. Learning to improvise on a musical instrument is really all about learning scales, phrases, motifs, and getting experienced in putting them together in a structured way. In realtime. The same is true for improvised presentations and speeches. After holding a number of presentations on my research lately, I have been thinking about how similar the preparation process for a presentation is to a music performance....

I have started testing CiteULike for creating an online bibliography, and came across this blog post on using CiteULike and BibDesk. I would really love to be able to synchronize BibDesk with CiteULike but that doesn’t seem like an option thus far.

Adrian Miles writes about why blogging is interesting for documentary film makers, and summarizes the discussion into the following key points: to document, discuss, reflect and engage with your own practice to promote and build awareness around your current project to spread promotion and recognition across the life of the entire project, and not just post-release so you have a network identity (when someone Googles you, or your project, they find what you say about things first) to present work in progress (brief rough cuts, for example) to present parts or all of your footage that ends up on the floor to solicit, by invitation or discovery, new material (people find you - see 4) relevant to your project to develop your own network skills so that the leap from old to new is lessened transparency about your process, which complements the implicit ethics of documentary as a practice to provide another way of contributing to your community (of documentary filmmakers, and the subject or subjects of your documentary work) I think these are equally interesting for all sorts of other projects, including my own research....

This video shows WiiMote used as a mouse on windows.

Benoît Bardy held a very interesting guest lecture on the topic “Perception-Action Dynamics Underlying Gesture Classification” yesterday. An interesting opening remark was on terminology. He commented that in his field (kinesiology) they never use the term gesture at all, while in the ConGAS community noone seems to talk about movement. He suggested the following definitions for some key terms: Gesture: non-verbal communication, body language, sign, expressive movements Movement: change in position/orientation Action: goal-directed movement Skill: capacity to reach a goal with efficient performance I have tried to understand if there is a difference between movement and motion, but he couldn’t enlighten me there....

Adrian Miles coins the term “profcasting” about academic podcasting: One of the reasons podcasting has had such an easy adoption within universities is that the form fits so comfortably within existing teaching models. […] The problems with it, […] It is asymmetric (I talk to you, you listen), it constructs the learner as passive, and it struggles to provide room for clarification and commentary (dialogue). On the other hand it can be very effective for those students who cannot attend the lecture […]...

I am very visually oriented and often prefer some graphic representation over text. Now, as I am starting to get into the writing face of my dissertation, I am looking for how to better incorporate visuals (and other media) as part of my dissertation. I will probably end up with some more or less traditionally formatted document, although I have been thinking about writing a hypertext document. However, I will probably make it as an electronic document (PDF) with included audio and video, and of course plenty of graphics and images....

InDesign used to be my program of choice for design issues, but since it is super-slow on my MacIntel I have been looking for another solution. OmniGraffle Pro has been my main tool for creating small vector graphics for a while, and I gave it a chance to make a full poster. I am very happy with the work flow and the end result looks great. It handles pictures effortlessly (although I miss some simple photo tweaking utilities and cropping) and the graphics look very crisp even in a large format....

In an interview, Trond Lossius discusses his take on sound art. He mentions how he treats video as an advanced spotlight, giving the eyes something to look at while listening to the sound: Video kommer jeg mest til å bruke som avanserte lyskilder. Tanken er at de skal invitere publikum til å bevege seg rundt i rommet, og dermed også utforske hvordan lyden varierer i rommet. Bevegelsene, teksturene og fargene i videoene kan gi øyet noe å hvile på og samtidig invitere til koblinger til hvilke kvaliteter lyden har....