I have previously written about why I dislike footnotes. Here, I explain why I dislike numbered citations. Numbered citations Consider this text fragment (from this paper): Here, the numbered citations are not helpful. You need to scroll to the end of the paper to figure out wat they mean. In practice, I only do that when I really want to check the reference. Most of the time, I just ignore the citations....
At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities....
There has been much discussion about ChatGPT recently, a chat robot that can write meaningful answers to questions. I haven’t had time to test it out properly, and it was unavailable when I wanted to check it today. Instead, I have played around with YouWrite, a service that can write text based on limited input. I thought it would be interesting to ask it to write about something I know well, so I asked it to write a text based on an abbreviated version of the abstract of my new book:...
I sent off the final proofs for my Sound Actions book before the summer. I don’t know when it will actually be published, but since it is off my table, I have had time to work on new projects. My new project AMBIENT will start soon, but I still haven’t been able to write up all the results from my two projects on music-related micro-motion: Sverm and MICRO. This will be the topic of the book I have started writing this summer, with the working title Still Standing: Exploring Human Micromotion....
Quotation marks are used for different things in texts. Sometimes they are used to mark actual quotations, things that people have said and written. Other times they are used to mark a word, such as this is “funny”. Some people also use them to Single vs double quotes There is not a right or wrong when it comes to using single (’) or double (") quotes. Different style guides say different things, so use whatever is suggested....
Ever since I finished my dissertation in 2007, I have thought about writing it up as a book. Parts of the dissertation were translated and extended in the Norwegian-language textbook Musikk og bevegelse (which, by the way, is out of print but freely available as an ebook). That book focused primarily on music-related body motion and was written for the course MUS2006 at the University of Oslo. However, my action-sound theory was only partially mentioned and never properly presented in a book format....
Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same....
I have been teaching the course Research Methods, Tools and Issues in our MCT programme this semester. The last class was an “open clinic” in which I answered questions about academic writing. Here is a summary of some of the things I answered, which may hopefully also be useful for others. Formatting Your academic exam paper is not the place to experiment with fancy layout and formatting. Some basic tips:...
I see that many students (and even peers) confuse the two terms “duration” and “length”. This blog post is placeholder to explain that duration is the length of time. I don’t want to write any wrong examples here on my blog, but here are two correct ones: The duration of the audio recording is 14 seconds. The length of the wand is 23 centimeters. Nothing wrong will happen if using them differently, but it is even better to be precise....
Last year I decided to use plain text files (TXT) as the main file type for all my computer text input. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one was all the problems experienced when trying to open other types of text-based files (RTF, DOC, etc.) on various iOS and Android devices that I use daily. Another reason is to become independent of specific software solutions, forcing you to use a specific software for something as basic as writing text on your computer or device....