ARJ

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

PD introductions in Norwegian on YouTube

Posted on | September 3, 2010 | No Comments

I am teaching two courses this semester:

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. So far I have made three screencasts going through the basics of PD and sound synthesis:

Category: Music
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Interdisciplinarity

Posted on | August 31, 2010 | 1 Comment

I am happy to see that the first point in the new UiO strategy plan is interdisciplinarity, or more specifically: ”Et grensesprengende universitet”. Interdisciplinarity is always easier in theory than in practice, and this is something I am debating in a feature article in the latest volume (pages 32-33) of Forskerforum, the journal of the The Norwegian Association of Researchers (Forskerforbundet).

I have written about interdisciplinarity on this blog several times before (here, here and here). In the new article I use interdisciplinarity to not only refer to adjacent scientific disciplines, but in a more general sense. I use some of my own work as the point of departure: the video analysis work that ended up as the Musical Gestures Toolbox started out as an artistic project, was later developed within my scientific PhD work, and is now being used for both artistic projects (e.g. by Victoria Johnson), research on ADHD (Terje Sagvolden’s group) and clinical use in the analysis of children with cerebral palsy (Lars Adde).

Unfortunately, getting support (economically, administrative, etc.) for such interdisciplinary research (including both scientific and artistic research) is currently not possible in Norway. In fact, the Norwegian Research Council does not fund artistic research at all, and the Research fellowship in the arts program does not fund scientific research.

In the end of my feature article I suggest three points to the Norwegian universities and the Norwegian Research Council for how to improve the conditions for interdisciplinary research in Norway:

  1. Set up truly interdisciplinary committees for all research funding
  2. Open for projects that contain both scientific and artistic research
  3. Set aside 10% of all research funding (in all disciplines) to be used for artistic work

 

Category: Thoughts
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Screen recording in QuickTime X

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | No Comments

I just discovered that QuickTime X has built in support for screen recording. I have been using iShowU for screen recordings for a while, and while it has the advantage of recording only a portion of the screen, the QT approach seems to be easier and quicker to work with. Short tutorial below:

Category: Software
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How to type degree symbol (OSX)

Posted on | August 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

I was looking for solutions on how to type the degree symbol (like in 0°) on OSX, but could only find solutions for English keyboard layout (or solutions suggesting copying an image…). After some trial and error I figured out the correct combination for a Norwegian keyboard layout: shift-alt-Q.

Category: Software
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Why open file formats matter

Posted on | August 22, 2010 | No Comments

Cleaning up on my hard drive, I came across a couple of .wks (MS Works spreadsheet) documents from 1994-95. I don’t really need to get at the contents of these files right now, but I think it could be useful to be able to open them at some point. So I tried to see if I could open them with any of the office programs I have on my computer (MS Office, Numbers, OpenOffice, NeoOffice).

MS Works used to be a quite widespread office suite that came with a lot of machines back in those days, and it is actually still in sale. Therefore you would imagine that MS programs should be able to open files from previous versions. Strangely enough, I discovered that MS spreadsheet flagship Excel can’t open the old MS Works files.

I haven’t tried the Windows version of Excel yet, but if that doesn’t work I guess I have to start up an old computer that may have MS Works installed (or pay for some conversion program). Yet another reason for working with open file formats.

Category: Thoughts
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