This summer, I got a phone call from TEDx Arendal asking about whether I would like to hold a lecture for this year’s event. Of course, I had to accept!

The excitement of being asked turned to awe when they asked me whether I would like to stand still in silence for the whole talk. This request did not come out of the blue. I have spent the last 15 years researching human standstill and have gotten some attention for my stillstanding project last year when I stood still for 10 minutes every day for a year. It was after this stunt that the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK called me Professor Stillstand, as a follow-up to my former nickname of Dr Air Guitar.

Of course, I had to take on the challenge, and really enjoyed being on stage in Arendal, standing still! I am also thrilled to see that the final recording has now been released:

Preparations

While preparing for the talk–and I should emphasize that TEDx talks are very well prepared–I realized together with my coaches that standing still in silence would not work best. It would have been spectacular in the hall, but it wouldn’t have made for such an illustrative video. So we decided that I would record a narrative that would tell my story while I was standing still.

However, I wouldn’t “just” stand there. After all, one of the points of my research has been to show that many things are going on in both the mind and body when standing still. Also, as a music technologist, I am constantly looking for ways to capture my body and mind and use these signals for both art and science. So I ended up standing on stage with lots of gear on.

More specifically, I was using:

  • Muscle armbands: I have worked a lot with the Myo armbands. Now I was wearing the brand new SiFiBand developed by RITMO alumni Ulysse Teller Masao Côté-Allard.
  • Eye tracking glasses: I decided to use one of the cabled glasses from PupilLabs. The new ones are easier to work with since they are self-calibrating. However, cabled solutions are generally more stable than relying on wireless transmission.
  • Respiration and heart rate: Here, I used the eq02+ LifeMonitor from EquiVital, which we have used for many of the orchestra projects we have had at RITMO recently.
  • Brain measurements: we do a lot of EEG recordings at RITMO, but nowadays, I am more excited about functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which estimates the concentration of haemoglobin from changes in absorption of near-infrared light in the brain. This is a technique we have successfully used on stage several times, including during MusicLab Brain

Big kudos

I should send warm thoughts and big thanks to the TEDxArendal team for their professional setup and warm hospitality. It was an honour to be part of their program. Now, I just need to find time to complete the book manuscript that tells the whole story about my standstill explorations.

Photo credit: Mona Hauglid Birgit Fostervold