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

We have also made available three use cases in the (soon to be expanded) fourMs database: simple mouse recording, sound saber and a short piano example. See the video below for a quick demonstration of how it works:

About motiongrams A motiongram is a way of displaying motion (e.g. human motion) in the time-domain, somehow similar to how we are used to working with time-representations of audio (e.g. waveform displays and sono/spectrograms). The method is based on creating a motion image, doing a matrix reduction on it and plotting the resultant 1xn or nx1 matrices over time either horizontally or vertically.

Comparison of motiongrams Below is an image showing three different types of motiongrams:

1. Single line scan based on regular image
2. Average scan based on regular image
3. Average scan based on motion image

I think all of them are interesting, so the use of them will have to be adjusted according to what type of material you are working with.

Working with various types of sensor and motion capture systems, I see the same need to know how much motion there is in the system, independent of the number of variables and dimensions in the system studied. Thus, whether we use a single 1-dimensional MIDI slider or 32 6-dimensional sensors in a motion capture system, we still need to be able to say whether there is any movement in the system, and approximately how much movement there is.

So I have made a small abstraction in Max that sums up all incoming values, divides by the number of values, finds the first derivative and takes the absolute value of this.

I had two optimization questions while working on the patch:

1. Does it matter whether derivation is done before or after summing up the values?
2. Is it more efficient to use Max objects than Jitter objects?

Answers:

1. No, it does not matter.
2. Max objects are ~3 times faster

A screenshot of the efficiency test patch is shown below, and a zip-file of the patches.

There were lots of people interested in the software at the conference, so while in London I spent some time cleaning up code, fixing bugs and rebuilding standalone applications for OSX. I will make Windows builds as well in the coming days. I have made a new fourMs software page where everything can be found.

There are probably lots of things missing, but at least this is a start of making these things accessible outside our group. Please report bugs. You could also suggest improvements, but I am not sure if I will have time to implement them anytime soon.

The initiative aims to investigate and demonstrate new possibilities emerging at the confluence between the human and technological realms. It will examine new modalities for individual and group perception, actions and experience in augmented, virtual spaces. Such virtual spaces would span the virtual reality continuum, also extending to purely synthetic but believable representation of massive, complex and dynamic data. Human-Computer confluence fosters inter-disciplinary research (such as Presence, neuro-science, machine learning and computer science) towards delivering unified experiences and inventing radically new forms of perception/action.

What started out as computer-human interaction (CHI), later to be renamed human-computer interaction (HCI), now goes in the direction of human-computer confluence. Sounds like we are going in the right direction. Now we just need to fill the words with some meaning.

First we had a workshop called embedded systems workshop, but which I retroactively have renamed RaPMIC workshop (Rapid Prototyping of Music Instruments and Controllers). Dan Overholt came up from Denmark with a bunch of CUIs and some pendaphonics. We spent time looking at various solutions for musical electronics, trying to solve bluetooth and virtual com port problems, etc. There are some pictures up on flickr, and a bunch of links to various interesting things are posted on the wiki.

Second, we had an OLO workshop at the Music Academy with Dan Trueman from Princeton University. During the last year we have had a few workshops and some concerts with various constellations of the Oslo Laptop Orchestra (OLO). We had already been playing some of the PLOrk repertoire on our own, so it was great to have Dan to help solve technical problems (particularly the automagic multicasting), as well as showing various conducting techniques. There are some photos on flickr, and a video coming as soon as I find some time to edit it.

Finally, we had a Jamoma workshop. The first day was a public workshop introducing Jamoma to beginnning and intermediary users. The rest of the week was a developer workshop where we fixed a number of issues that have been plaguing the current 0.5 beta release, as well as laying the grounds for future development towards Jamoma 0.6. (flickr)

It has been great to get started doing various things in the lab. The new space has proven excellent for our activities, and it has been great that lots of people from outside of the group has also found the way to the lab. I am also happy that all of the activities have been based on collaboration between the university, the music academy and NOTAM.