Happy new year! As we move into 2026, I am currently undergoing a gradual shift in my academic life. I don’t have any new annual projects planned this year (like 365 Sound Actions or #StillStanding). This year is more about wrapping up old things and moving on with exciting new projects.
I am more or less done with writing Still Standing, which summarizes 15 years of micromotion research. My AMBIENT project is also about to end, with sveral of my doctoral and postdoctoral fellows wrapping up their projects in the coming months. The plan is to write a book based on AMBIENT, too, summarizing my interest in indoor environments. However, book writing takes time, so it will probably take a few years before I have completed that project.
I am still directing RITMO, which is now in its 9th year. The coming year, we will see most of our second-generation PhD fellows completing their theses and we will begin planning the final conference, which will most likely be held in June 2027.
While we are planning the end of RITMO, we are also establishing MishMash. This is a huge consortium, so everything takes a lot of time. However, we are currently on schedule with recruiting around 30 PhDs and postdocs to start in the fall this year. The plan is to have them all in place for the opening conference to be held in Kristiansand in September 2026.
In addition to directing the whole thing, I also want to use MishMash as an “excuse” to return to basic AI research myself. I have been using AI tools since I began my academic research by studying artificial neural networks and music in the early 2000s. All my PhD fellows work on and with various types of AI-based methods, these days, mainly working on various types of deep learning-approaches to “multimodal data”.
While large models are powerful and interesting, I will go the opposite way, exploring small-scale AI algorithms for music performance. I have already begun picking up some of the work I did for my Master’s exam concert more than two decades ago. I am looking forward to continue these explorations this year.