A note is not a tone

I often come across texts that confuse the concepts of notes and tones. Thus this little blog post that I can refer people when explaining the difference. While the terms “note” and “tone” may be used interchangeably in casual conversation, they have distinct meanings from a music theoretical perspective: Note: A note refers to a symbol in musical notation that tells the musician which pitch to play and for how long....

July 5, 2023 · 1 min · 171 words · ARJ

Horizontal and Vertical Averaging is not the same

For my year-long StillStanding project I am generating videograms for all the scenes. Since there is not much motion in these 10-minute recordings, they typically look like stripes. Looking at today’s recording of an unspectacular hotel room in Kongsberg, I noticed how different the horizontal and vertical videogram look: It is fascinating how two averages of the same video recording can be so different. The explanation is simple; they are based on averaging in two different dimensions (horizontal and vertical)....

July 5, 2023 · 1 min · 96 words · ARJ

Sound and Light vs Audio and Video

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....

July 4, 2023 · 1 min · 208 words · ARJ

Sound vs Audio

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....

March 21, 2023 · 1 min · 210 words · ARJ

Difference between the terms movement and motion

Terminology is always challenging. I have previously written about definitions of actions and gesture several times (e.g. here, here, and here) and chapter 2 in the book Musical gestures: sound, movement, and meaning (Routledge, 2010). Movement vs motion There are, however, two words/terms that I still find very challenging to define properly and to differentiate: movement and motion. In Norwegian, we only have one word (bevegelse) for describing movement/motion, which makes everything much simpler....

October 2, 2011 · 4 min · 662 words · ARJ

Analysis terminology

I was involved in a discussion about the difference between some terms that are frequently used: analysis, data processing, feature extraction, etc. To summarize my thoughts on how these terms are related, I made the little sketch below: {width=“260” height=“227”} Rather than just storing it in my digital archive, I thought it might be useful for others, and could also hopefully lead to some interesting comments.

February 3, 2011 · 1 min · 66 words · ARJ

Music content processing

Dear child has many names. In [[this call]{style=“text-decoration: underline;”}]{style=“color: #0000ee;”} for a special journal issue on music and robotics, I see the use of the word music content processing (MCP). I have been around in the larger music technology community for a while now, but I haven’t really thought of this as a concept in itself before. Using Google as a reference, I see that “music content processing” actually returns 34 100 hits, so obviously it is being used quite extensively....

November 13, 2010 · 1 min · 204 words · ARJ