Sound

I am happy to announce the publication of the anthology Sonic Design- Explorations Between Art and Science.This 17-chapter volume explores sonic design practice and theory and celebrates the lifelong achievements of Professor Rolf Inge Godøy. The anthology is based on selected contributions at the International Seminar on Sonic Design, which took place in May 2022. The seminar was set up to celebrate Rolf Inge Godøy, my former supervisor, mentor, colleague and friend, uphon his retirement....

Yesterday, I completed my year-long StillStanding project. This was my second year-long project. In 2022, I recorded one sound action daily. When I reached the end of 2022, I found it to be an efficient way of collecting data. My 2023 project confirmed this belief, so I am inspired to try another year-long experiment. Focusing on AMBIENT I will spend the coming month completing the Still Standing manuscript. I am saying this loud now to put pressure on myself and help the world understand why I must focus on writing....

People often refer to “sound and video” as a concept pair. That is confusing because, in my thinking, “sound” and “video” refer to very different things. In this post, I will explain the difference. Sound and Audio In a previous blog post, I have written about the difference between sound and audio. The short story is that “sound” refers to the physical phenomenon of vibrating molecules, such as sound waves moving through air....

What is the difference between sound and audio? I often hear people confuse the terms. Here are a couple of ways of thinking about the difference. A good summary can be found in this blog post: Sound is vibrations through materials Audio is the technology to hear sounds coming from natural or human-made sources Another good definition is that audio is electrical energy (active or potential) that represents sound. From this, a sound recording is stored as an audio file....

What is the difference between “sound design” and “sonic design”? This is one of the many questions I have pondered while preparing the International Seminar on Sonic Design the last half year. My idea with using the term “sonic design” for the seminar was inspired by Professor Rolf Inge Godøy, my former supervisor, mentor, colleague and friend, to whom the seminar was dedicated. With his background in music performance and composition, he always talked about how musicians and composers “shape” sound through their practice....

One month has passed of the year and my sound action project. I didn’t know how it would develop when I started and have found it both challenging and inspiring. It has also engaged people around me more than I had expected. Each day I upload one new video recording to YouTube and post a link on Twitter. If you want to look at the whole collection, it is probably better to check out this playlist:...

At the NordicSMC conference last week, I was part of a panel discussing the topic Rigorous Empirical Evaluation of SMC Research. This was the original description of the session: The goal of this session is to share, discuss, and appraise the topic of evaluation in the context of SMC research and development. Evaluation is a cornerstone of every scientific research domain, but is a complex subject in our context due to the interdisciplinary nature of SMC coupled with the subjectivity involved in assessing creative endeavours....

This year’s Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Conference has opened for virtual lab tours. When we cannot travel to visit each other, this is a great way to showcase how things look and what we are working on. Stefano Fasciani and I teamed up a couple of weeks ago to walk around some of the labs and studios at the Department of Musicology and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion....

I have recently played with AudioStellar, a great tool for “sound object”-based exploration and musicking. It reminds me of CataRT, a great tool for concatenative synthesis. I used CataRT quite a lot previously, for example, in the piece Transformation. However, after I switched to Ubuntu and PD instead of OSX and Max, CataRT was no longer an option. So I got very excited when I discovered AudioStellar some weeks ago. It is lightweight and cross-platform and has some novel features that I would like to explore more in the coming weeks....

Yesterday, PhD fellow Mojtaba Karbassi presented his research on impedance control in robotic drumming at RITMO. I will surely get back to discussing more of his research later. Today, I wanted to share the analysis of one of the videos he showed. Mojtaba is working on developing a robot that can play a double stroke drum roll. To explain what this is, he showed this video he had found online, made by John Wooton:...