Research

Strange that I didn’t see this before. Apparently, W3C has made a draft for multimodal annotation called EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. The abstract of the document reads: The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input....

I just realised that it is possible to export BibTex entries directly from Google Scholar. This, and other bibliography entry formats, can be set at the bottom of the Scholar Preferences panel. I can’t tell how much easier this makes my life

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. […] Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 ? k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources....

I need to be better at using the delete-button. Computers have made it so easy to write and save lots of text, probably too easy. Since there are no limits, I tend to just shuffle things around the documents (I have one document per chapter) making up my dissertation draft. Throughout the last years, I have been collecting all these small snippets of comments, thoughts and quotes, and I have started to think that now is the time to start using that delete-button rather than just keep moving things around....

jill/txt is discussing whether the novelty of blogs is wearing off: For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. […] And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out. I think the comment by Linn is right on the target:...

DevonThink Pro has a concordance function that counts all the words in my research database, currently containing a little more than one thousand documents. This might seem like a trivial function, but it really is an interesting read. First there is a bunch of standard words: Frequency Word --- --- 243220 the 111156 and 41456 for 38622 that 34588 The 25630 with 25591 are 18692 this 17210 from 15045 can ....

Craig Sapp (formerly at CCARH now at CHARM) writes: I have been analyzing the performances of Chopin Mazurkas and have been noticing an unusual occurence: the performances of the same two pianists always matched whenever I do an analysis for a particular mazurka. In fact, they matched as well as two different re-releases of the same original recording. The full story about how the tracks have been slightly time-stretched, panned and EQed before being rereleased is covered in a recent story in Gramophone....

We had a meeting about GDIF at McGill yesterday, and I realised that people had very different thoughts about what it is and what it can be used for. While GDIF is certainly intended for formalising the way we code movement and gesture information for realtime usage in NIME using OSC, it is also supposed to be used for offline analysis. I think the best way of doing this, is to have a three level approach as sketched here:...

Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit....

I am spending quite a bit of time on reading and writing blogs, e-mail lists and forums every day. After talking to a person that thought this would be just a waste of time, I have been thinking about why this could be justified from a research perspective. While in many cases it could be considered waste of time, in other cases it is really crucial for my research. Working in a fast moving field, where quite a bit of the activities happen online and very little is available through traditional research channels (e....