Sound

New publication: **Title ** Analyzing correspondence between sound objects and body motion Authors Kristian Nymoen, Rolf Inge Godøy, Alexander Refsum Jensenius and Jim Tørresen has now been published in ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. Abstract Links between music and body motion can be studied through experiments called sound-tracing. One of the main challenges in such research is to develop robust analysis techniques that are able to deal with the multidimensional data that musical sound and body motion present....

Yesterday, I performed with the Norwegian Noise Orchestra at Betong in Oslo, at a concert organised by Dans for Voksne. The orchestra is an ad-hoc group of noisy improvisers, and I immediately felt at home. The performance lasted for 12 hours, from noon to midnight, and I performed for two hours in the afternoon. For the performance I used my Soniperforma patch based on the sonifyer technique and the Jamoma module I developed a couple of years ago (jmod....

I am currently working on some extensions to my motiongram-sonifyer, and came across this beautiful little film by Norman McLaren from 1940: The sounds heard in the film are entirely synthetic, created by drawing in the sound-track part of the film. McLaren explained this a 1951 BBC interview: I draw a lot of little lines on the sound-track area of the 35-mm. film. Maybe 50 or 60 lines for every musical note....

Edit: These files are now more easily accessible from my UiO page. While preparing a lecture for the PhD students at the Norwegian Academy of Music, I came across some of the sound files I created for my MA thesis on salience in (musical) sound perception. While the content of that thesis is now most interesting as a historical document, I had a good time listening to the sound examples again....

I have written about my making of a series of sreencasts of basic sound synthesis in puredata in an earlier blog post. The last addition to the series is the building of a patch that shows how a simple impulse response, combined with a delay, a feedback loop and a low pass filter, can be used to simulate reverberation. In fact, dependent on the settings, this patch can also be used for making phasor, flanger, chorus and echo as well....

After working with music-related movements for some years, and thereby arguing that movement is an integral part of music, I tend to react when people use “music” as a synonym for either “score” or “sound”. I certainly agree that sound is an important part of music, and that scores (if they exist) are related to both musical sound and music in general. But I do not agree that music is sound....

I am teaching a course in sound theory this semester, and therefore thought it was time to update a little program I developed several years ago, called SoundAnalysis. While there are many excellent sound analysis programs out there (SonicVisualiser, Praat, etc.), they all work on pre-recorded sound material. That is certainly the best approach to sound analysis, but it is not ideal in a pedagogical setting where you want to explain things in realtime....

I am teaching two courses this semester: Sound theory 1 (in English) Sound analysis (in Norwegian, together with Rolf Inge Godøy) In both courses I use Pure Data (PD) for demonstrating various interesting phenomena (additive synthesis, beating, critical bands, etc.), and the students also get various assignments to explore such things themselves. There are several PD introduction videos on YouTube in English, but I found that it could be useful to also have something in Norwegian....