Some pictures from the kickoff-seminar for the Sensing Music-related Actions project last week: Project leader Rolf-Inge Godøy started with a short presentation of the new project. Then Marcelo M. Wanderley (McGill, Montreal) held an overview of various types of motion capture solutions, and the pros and cons of each of them. He stressed two main challenges he had had over the years: synchronisation of various types of mo-cap data with audio, video, music notation, etc....
It has now been confirmed that the Sensing Music-related Actions project will move into new spaces in a building called Veglaboratoriet. The building, which used to house various types of chemical laboratories, is located next to the computer science building. The downside is that we will be farther away from the music department (10 minutes to walk…), but we will be one floor up from the robot lab of the ROBIN group, the partner in our new project....
Came across a student project from Cornell on doing motion capture using accelerometers, based on the Atmel controller. It is a nice overview of many of the challenges faced when working with accelerometers, and the implementation seems to work well. {width=“300/”}
A couple of weeks ago we had an excursion to an anechoic chamber in the basement of the physics department at the University of Oslo. This room is a remainder from back when there was an acoustics group in Oslo (which later moved to Trondheim), and it was a pure coincidence that we discovered that the old room is still intact, largely thanks to Arnt Inge Vistnes. He also happens to be the person that first introduced me to the Fourier transform back in the days when I studied physics, so he got the challenge of holding a guest lecture for our students in sound theory on the topic of (…) the Fourier transform....
The web page for our new research project called Sensing Music-related Actions is now up and running. This is a joint research project of the departments of Musicology and Informatics, and has received external funding through the VERDIKT program of the The Research Council of Norway. The project runs from July 2008 until July 2011. The focus of the project will be on basic issues of sensing and analysing music-related actions, and creating various prototypes for testing the control possibilities of such actions in enactive devices....
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 Chronicle reports that Harvard University enforces an Open Access policy for all publications made by the faculty. This is great, and a drastic step towards making research more publicly available. We have an Open Access system at UiO (called DUO), but so far this is mainly used to publish master theses. I have tried to push for the option to upload other types of publications there too, and this is supposed to be possible now from the FRIDA system which we use to document all research activities....
We had a programming session this morning, and Paolo Coletta implemented a block for creating motiongrams in EyesWeb. It will be available in the new EyesWeb XMI release which will happen in the end of this week. Great!
I am participating in the EyesWeb Week in Genoa this week. This morning Nicola Bernardini held a lecture about Free Software. I have heard him talk on this topic several times before, but as I have now some more experience on participating in a Free Software project (i.e. Jamoma), I got more out of his ideas. Some main points from the talk: Use Free Software! Freeware and shareware may have nothing to do with Free Software....
There has been quite a lot of media interest concerning my PhD disputation last week. A Norwegian news search engine reports some 80 appearances, and this is not counting all the radio interviews I have done… Here are some examples: TV: NRK - Store Studio NRK - Østlandssendingen TV Budstikka Nettavisen ScanpixNTB TV Newspapers: Forskning.no Dagens Næringsliv NRK.no Vårt land + 40 something versions of the story that NTB wrote (national news agency) “Dr....