I am happy to announce a new online course from RITMO: Pupillometry – The Eye as a Window Into the Mind. This is the third so-called Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) I have been part of making, following Motion Capture and Music Moves. I am excited to get it started on Monday, 16 January. Discover the applications of pupillometry research Pupillometry is a relatively new research method within the sciences, and it has wide-ranging applications within psychology, neuroscience, and beyond.

Today, I ran a workshop called Video Visualization together with RITMO research assistant Joachim Poutaraud. The workshop was part of the Digital Scholarship Days 2023 organized by the University of Oslo Library, four days packed of hands-on tutorials of various useful things. Presentation slides made by Jupyter Notebook Joachim has done a fantastic job updating the Wiki with all the new things he has implemented in the toolbox. However, the Wiki is not the best thing to use in a workshop, it has too much information and would create an information overload for the participants.

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording sensor data from my mobile phone while standing still for 10 minutes at a time. This is a highly curiosity-driven and data-based project, and part of the exploration is to figure out what I can get out of the sensors. I have started sharing graphs of the linear acceleration of my sessions with the tag #StillStanding on Mastodon. However, I wondered if this is the sensor data that best represents the motion.

Yesterday, I completed my 365 Sound Actions project, during which I recorded one sound action per day as part of preparing for the launch of my book Sound Actions. Today, on 1 January 2023, I start this year’s project: recording myself standing still 10 minutes every day. You can follow the progress on Mastodon. Starting up AMBIENT Although I am happy about completing my sound actions project, I have enjoyed the ritual of doing something every day.

1 January this year, I set out to record one sound action per day. The idea was to test out the action–sound theory from my book Sound Actions. One thing is writing about action–sound couplings and mappings, another is to see how the theory works with real-world examples. As I commented on after one month, the project has been both challenging and inspiring. Below I write about some of my experiences but first, here is the complete list:

I am doing some end of the year cleaning on my hard drive and just uploaded the Jupyter Notebook I used in the analysis of a mobile phone lying still earlier this year. For some future studies, I thought it would be interesting to explore the PDF export functionality from Jupyter. That worked very well except for that I didn’t get any title or author name on top: Then I found a solution on Stack Overflow.

I came across an interesting blog post by Alex Chen on how to write better image descriptions for web pages. They propose an “object-action-context” approach when writing image descriptions. I see that such an approach could also be helpful for my sound actions project. Adding better descriptions I am soon getting to the end of my year-long project of recording one sound action daily. A sound action is a multimodal entity consisting of body motion and its resultant sound.

Last week, my book was published by the MIT Press, and I am happy to announce that the source code is available on GitHub. Most people are probably mainly interested in the content of the book. If so, you should grab a free copy of the final version. This blog post explains why I have made the source code available. License I was fortunate to secure funding from the University of Oslo to make the book freely available, what is often referred to as Open Access.

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 am happy to announce that my book Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments is now published! I am also thrilled that this is an open access book, meaning that is free to download and read. You are, of course, also welcome to pick up a paper copy! Here is a quick video summary of the book’s content: In the book, I combine perspectives from embodied music cognition and interactive music technology.