Research

Inspired by the work [[[Static no. 12 by Daniel Crooks that I watched at the Sydney Biennale]{.entry-content}]{.status-content}]{.status-body} a couple of weeks ago, I have added the option of scanning a single column in the jmod.motiongram% module in Jamoma. Here is a video that shows how this works in practice: About motiongrams A motiongram is a way of displaying motion (e.g. human motion) in the time-domain, somehow similar to how we are used to working with time-representations of audio (e....

In video analysis I have been working with what is often referred to as “quantity of motion” (which should not be confused with momentum, the product of mass and velocity p=mv), i.e. the sum of all active pixels in a motion image. In this sense, QoM is 0 if there is no motion, and has a positive value if there is motion in any direction. Working with various types of sensor and motion capture systems, I see the same need to know how much motion there is in the system, independent of the number of variables and dimensions in the system studied....

The new University of Oslo contract with Springer means that staff and students get access to all Springer books (~15 000) published since 2005 (titles available here). Now I just need to get an iPad to start reading…

A quick observation this morning as I was brushing up on a couple of grammatical things over at Grammar Girl while finishing a book chapter: Concerning the abbreviations i.e. (that is) and e.g. (for example), most American English dictionaries seem to suggest that they should be followed by a comma, while in British English it is fine to leave the commas out. That said, abbreviations generally makes a text less approachable, so you might want to spell out the words in plain text....

I was at the Musical Body conference at University of London last week and presented my work on visualisation of music-related movements. For my PhD I developed the Musical Gestures Toolbox as a collection of components and modules for Max/MSP/Jitter, and most of this has been merged into Jamoma. However, lots of potential users are not familiar with Max, so over the last couple of years I have decided to develop standalone applications for some of the main tasks....

A couple of weeks ago I came across the English word confluence. The Oxford dictionary informs me that this means “the junction of two rivers, esp. rivers of approximately equal width”. That sounds very poetic, and it gets even better when you combine it with humans and computers, as they have done in the call for FP7 FET projects: The initiative aims to investigate and demonstrate new possibilities emerging at the confluence between the human and technological realms....

We have set up a new wiki for the fourMs lab. It is mainly intended as a place for tutorials and various tricks and tips in using the software and hardware systems available. Hopefully, the wiki can also be useful for other researchers in the field.

The last few weeks have been quite busy here in Oslo. We opened the new lab just about a month ago, and since then I have organised several workshops, guest lectures and concerts both at UiO and at NMH. I was planning to post some longer descriptions of what has been going on, but decided to go for a summary instead. {height=“150”} First we had a workshop called embedded systems workshop, but which I retroactively have renamed RaPMIC workshop (Rapid Prototyping of Music Instruments and Controllers)....

We are having a Jamoma workshop at the fourMs lab this week. Most of the time is being spent on making Jamoma 0.5 stable, but we are also discussing some other issues. Throughout these discussions, particularly about how to handle multichannel audio in Max, I have realised that we should also start thinking about data signals as a type in itself. Jamoma is currently, as is Max, split into three different “types” of modules and processing: control, audio and video....

While in Gent a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit the Logos Foundation and hear a concert with the robot orchestra. It was very interesting to hear Godfried-Willem Raes talk about his instruments and his music making, which has been going on for almost 40 years.