Research

Derek Kverno and Jim Nolen have studied the vibration of circular, square and rectangular plates with unbound edges, and have posted som very nice images of radiation patterns of vibrating plates.

What I find most fascinating about Apple’s new iPhone, is the shift from buttons to body. Getting away from the paradigm of pressing buttons to make a call or to navigate, the iPhone boasts a large multi-touch screen where the user will be able to interact by pointing at pictures and objects. Furthermore, the built-in rotation sensor will sense the direction of the device and rotate the screen accordingly, somehow similar to how new digital cameras rotate the pictures you take automatically....

I had a discussion about which software tools I use for my research, so here is a list of the most important (in no particular order): Firefox: with adblock and mouse gestures. NetNewsWire: for handling all the blogs I am reading. MarsEdit: to write blog entries. Publishes directly to my WordPress driven blog. OmniGraffle: for making diagrams. I even made my last conference poster with this program, works great also with photos....

John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity: REDUCE – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction ORGANIZE – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer TIME – Savings in time feel like simplicity LEARN – Knowledge makes everything simpler DIFFERENCES – Simplicity and complexity need each other CONTEXT – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral EMOTION – More emotions are better than less TRUST – In simplicity we trust FAILURE – Some things can never be made simple THE ONE – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

How to distribute things through Amazon. Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89. Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC. Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year. Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside. Ship two copies to Amazon Send cover scan Track sales Register it (optional)

I came across Dave Parry’s blog academhack, with some interesting comments on Mac software in an academic context. I was particularly happy about his 5 Ways to use Quicksilver, which helped me get started using the web and dictionary search in Quicksilver.

An interesting quote from Robert Hatten’s 2004 book on musical gestures: Musical gesture is biologically and culturally grounded in communicative human movement. Gesture draws upon the close interaction (and intermodality) of a range of human perceptual and motor systems to synthesize the energetic shaping of motion through time into significant events with unique expressive force. The biological and cultural motivations of musical gesture are further negotiated within the conventions of a musical style, whose elements include both the discrete (pitch, rhythm, meter) and the analog (dynamics, articulation, temporal pacing)....

Joel Spolsky writes about flow: We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow”, also known as being “in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration…trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers – especially interruptions by coworkers – all knock you out of the zone....

I am working on the theory chapter of my dissertation, and am trying to pin down some terminology. For a long time I have been using the concept of gesture-sound relationships to denote the intimate links between a physical movement and the resultant sound. However, since I am throwing away gesture for now, I also need to reconsider the rest of my vocabulary. Hodgins (2004) uses the term music-movement structural correspondences, which I find problematic since it places music first....

I have been struggling with the word gesture for a while. I, and many others in the music cognition/technology community, have been using it to denote music-related actions (i.e. physical body movement). Not only is the term confusing in the musicology community (e.g. the way Hatten writes about inner-musical qualities), but it is also a misleading term in behavioral and linguistics communities, where gesture usually denotes communicative hand movement or facial expressions....