Research

Last week I participated in the Teatrix workshop organized by BEK at USF Verftet in Bergen. The idea was to explore technology in a stage setting. The people participating were: Paola Tognazzi, H.C. Gilje, Gisle Frøysland, Marie Nerland, Trond Lossius, Thorolf Thuestad, Tim Place, Iver Findlay, Linda Birkedal, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Georges Gagneré, Anders Gogstad. The most interesting for me was the chance to work together with Tim Place and Trond Lossius on Jamoma, and during the week we had the chance to discuss and develop quite a lot....

Bob L. Sturm at UC Santa Barbara: {.imagelink}VLDCMCaR (pronounced vldcmcar) is a MATLAB application for exploring concatenative audio synthesis using six independent matching criteria. The entire application is encompassed in a graphical user interface (GUI). Using this program a sound or composition can be concatenatively synthesized using audio segments from a corpus database of any size. Mahler can be synthesized using hours of Lawrence Welk; howling monkeys can approximate President Bush’s speech; and a Schoenberg string quartet can be remixed using Anthony Braxton playing alto saxaphone....

John Lazarro writes on the Auditory list: *Apple released a software update today for iPods, that lets users set a maximum dB level for the device, and lets parents lockdown the maximum dB level of their children’s iPod with a combination lock. Apple also put up a website on how to use the feature to limit long-term hearing damage. *

Daniel Rozin has made some Wooden Mirrorsfrom various materials. Any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.

Forbes.com writes about Charles Jorgensen who is working on what he calls subvocal speech recognition. He attaches a set of electrodes to the skin of his throat and his words are recognized by a computer even when he is not producing any sound.

I also recently got to know that two papers I have been co-authoring have been accepted to NIME in Paris. One is called “Towards a Coherent Terminology and Model of Instrument Description and Design” and the other “Towards a Gesture Description Interchange Format”. The idea in the latter is to develop a set of gestural descriptors as a GDIF to match the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) which has been around for some years....

Mark just pointed me to the web page of Spectra Symbol, a company making membrane switches and linear position sensors. I particularly like the circular position sensor!

Nature News writes about a recent discovery of how rats running through a maze tend to have a backwards replay of the route when resting: As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space. But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting....

Metadata Hootenanny is a tool for easy adding metadata (annotations and chapters) to QuickTime files. It also has a nice timeline function, showing the frames (or only keyframes) of the movie file, where it is possible to easy navigate and add chapter information. Seems like an easy way of adding information quickly to movie files, although it does not have any more advanced features as found in real annotation software....

A short overview of various video annotation software: - Anvil by Michael Kipp is a java-based program for storing several layers of annotations, like a text sequencer. Can only use avi files. Intended for gesture research (understood as gestures used when talking). - Transana from University of Wisconsin, Madison, is developed mainly as a tool for transcribing and describing video and audio content. Seems like it is mainly intended for behavioural studies....