Sound Actions

Last week I presented the paper Some Challenges Related to Music and Movement in Mobile Music Technology at the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. A PDF of the paper is available here. Not sure if the abstract justifies the fairly dense paper, but at least it is compact. Mobile music technology opens many new opportunities in terms of location-aware systems, social interaction etc., but we should not forget that many challenges faced in ”immobile” music technology research are also apparent in mobile computing....

My dissertation came from the printing company yesterday. Here’s a picture of some of them: It feels a bit weird to see the final book lying there, being the result of a year of planning and three years of hard work. I wrote most of it last spring, submitting the manuscript in July. Now, about half a year later, I have a much more distant relationship to the whole thing. Seeing the final result is comforting, but it is also sad to let go....

Participating in the Open Form rehearsals and workshops has been very interesting (as previously mentioned here). One thing has puzzled me over the last few days: the lack of focusing on the musical objects. I use musical object to denote a coherent entity consisting of sounding objects (in a Schaefferian sense) but also all the other modalities (in my case particularly visual and haptic features). The musical object is a rather short entity, typically in the range between 1-5 seconds, but sometimes shorter or longer....