ARJ

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Teaching

I teach the following courses at University of Oslo:

All the course material is available online (Norwegian only).

I also regularly teach lectures in other courses at the university and other institutions, as well as supervising students. For this I have compiled a list of suggestions for introduction texts to musicology, music cognition and music technology, as well as the following list of software that I find useful:

  • Scientific writing: If you want to save yourself a lot of problems when it comes to formatting and structuring your documents, I would highly recommend not to write your master thesis in MS Word. If you need to have a WYSIWYG approach, you are better off with OpenOffice (or NeoOffice on OSX). My personal preference is to use LaTeX (with the nice MacTex installer for OS X). I used to use TexShop as my text editor, but have found TextMate to suit my needs better.
  • Bibliography manager: I cannot stress enough how important it is to use a real bibliography manager to handle all your references. The most popular program is probably EndNote, which also has plugins for MS Word. My personal favourite is the freeware program BibDesk which is actually a frontend to BibTex. It allows for storing abstracts and annotations together with your reference, and it will also organise a folder with related PDF-files.
  • Utilities: Menumeters are great for displaying memory/CPU usage etc. You will probably find that you work much faster on your computer if you start using some quick launcher program. Two good and free programs are Quicksilver (OSX) and Launchy (Windows)
  • Development: Max/MSP and Jitter are my preferred development tools for creating music and video analysis and synthesis applications. An open-source solution to Max is PD (check out the PD extended package for an easier start) which is more lightweight and scalable than Max (but also has less advanced features and poorer documentation). I have always wanted to start using SuperCollider, but have never gotten around to do it. I will probably spend time on Chuck instead, since it is small, multiplatform, and has some nice new analysis features. For video development, I continue to tell myself that I should get more into Processing. It looks really cool and powerful.
  • Audio editing: Back in my Windows-days I used to be a fan of SoundForge. I have never found a good replacement on OS X, but I don’t really need audio editors so much anymore. Usually I end up using Audacity which is not spectactular in any way, but it is open source and usually does what I want. Btw: did you check out the super-simple trim functionality of QuickTime Pro?
  • Audio analysis: AudioSculpt used to be the best program for audio analysis, but today it is challenged by several free applications. Sonic Visualiser is an easy to use program for visualising sound. On Windows there is a free and simple program called Spectrogram. Praat is an extensive sound analysis package made for linguistics, which also works well for musical sound analysis, and it can export high quality images of the analysis. SPEAR allows for working with partials of the sound, and easily play back only parts of the spectrum (and it exports SDIF files!). For realtime audio analysis, there aren’t so many options, but check out rt_lpc and my own SoundAnalysis which is built with Max/MSP (Max offers many audio analysis objects, btw). The most advanced solution is to use Matlab (or Octave which can be installed on OSX through Fink), but this requires some scripting.

Useful web tools

  • The Auditory list is a great resource for issues related to hearing and sound perception/cognition. Many of the most established researchers are reading the list and posting regularly.
  • The Max/MSP/Jitter forum is discussing issues related to Max development.
  • Sensorwiki contains lots of information about sensors, interfaces, etc.
  • Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion are great sources of inspiration for experimental audio and video.