Videogram

I participated in the conference The Aesthetics of Absence in Music of the Twenty-First Century at the Department of Musicology the last couple of days. Judith Lochhead started her keynote lecture with a clip from the movie The art of flying by Jan van Ijken. This is a beautiful short film based on clips of flocking birds: The art of flying from Jan van IJken on Vimeo. Of course, I wanted to see how some video visualizations would work, so I reached for the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python....

I have been exploring different video visualizations as part of my annual stillstanding project. Some of these I post as part of my daily Mastodon updates, while others I only test for future publications. Most of the video visualizations and analyses are made with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and structured as Jupyter Notebooks. I have been pondering whether skipping frames is a good idea. The 360-degree videos that I create visualizations from are shot at 25 fps....

Musique de Table is a wonderful piece written by Thierry de Mey. I have seen it performed live several times, and here came across a one-shot video recording that I thought it would be interesting to analyse: The test with some video visualization tools in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. For running the commands below, you first need to import the toolbox in Python: import musicalgestures as mg I started the process by importing the source video:...

After exploring some visualizations of kayaking, I was eager to see how a similar approach could work for walking. On a trip to the Norwegian mountains, specifically at Haugastøl, situated halfway between Oslo and Bergen, I strapped a GoPro Hero Black 10 on my chest and walked up and down a nearby hill called Storevarden. The walk was approximately 25 minutes up and down, and a fast-forward version of the video can be seen here:...

I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012. Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4CBsDT37I As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still....

I continue my testing of the new Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. One thing is to use the toolbox on controlled recordings with stationary cameras and non-moving backgrounds (see examples of visualizations of AIST videos). But it is also interesting to explore “real world” videos (such as the Bergensbanen train journey). I came across a great video of flamenco dancer Selene Muñoz, and wondered how I could visualize what is going on there:...

Like many others, I bought a kayak during the pandemic, and I have had many nice trips in the Oslo fiord over the last year. Working at RITMO, I think a lot about rhythm these days, and the rhythmic nature of kayaking made me curious to investigate the pattern a little more. Capturing kayaking motion My spontaneous investigations into kayak motion began with simply recording a short video of myself kayaking....

I came across a fantastic performance of a Bach prelude played on Boomwhackers by Les Objets Volants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5seI0eJZCg It is really incredible how they manage to coordinate the sticks and make it into a beautiful performance. Given my interest in the visual aspects of music performance, I reached for the Musical Gestures Toolbox to create some video visualisations. I started with creating an average image of the video: This image is not particularly interesting....

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:...

I came across a very interesting study on the Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees. The authors have shared the videos recorded in the study (Open Research is great!), so I was eager to try out some analyses with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab. Here is an example of one of the videos from the collection: The video quality is not very good, so I had my doubts about what I could find....