Citizen Science is on everyone’s lips these days, at least on the lips of people working in research administration, funding agencies and in institutional leadership. As a member of the EUA Expert Group on Open Science/Science 2.0, I am also involved in ongoing discussions on the topic. Yesterday, I took part in the workshop Citizen Science in an institutional context organized by EUA and OpenAire. A recording of my talk is available here:...
A couple of days ago, I read an interesting paper about a new AI algorithm that can summarize long texts. This is an attempt to solve the problem of tl;dr texts, meaning “too long, didn’t read”. The article reminded me that the same problem exists for music, in which case it would probably be tl;dl: “too long, didn’t listen”. I was interested in this topic back when I wrote my master’s thesis about short-term music recognition....
Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same....
Last week I was interviewed about music and artificial intelligence (AI). This led to several different stories on radio, TV, and as text. The reason for the sudden media interest in this topic was a story by The Guardian on the use of deep learning for creating music. They featured an example of the creation of Sinatra-inspired music made using a deep learning algorithm: After these stories were published, I was asked about participating in a talk-show on Friday evening....
FFmpeg is a fantastic resource for doing all sorts of video manipulations from the terminal. However, it has a lot of features, and it is not always easy to understand what they all mean. I was interested in understanding more about how the tblend function works. This is a function that blends successive frames in 30 different ways. To get a visual understanding of how the different operations work, I decided to try them all out on the same video file....
Many people talk about “opening” the research process these days. Due to initiatives like Plan S, much has happened when it comes to Open Access to research publications. There are also things happening when it comes to sharing data openly (or at least FAIR). Unfortunately, there is currently more talking about Open Research than doing. At RITMO, we are actively exploring different strategies for opening our research. The most extreme case is that of MusicLab....
I came across a very interesting study on the Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees. The authors have shared the videos recorded in the study (Open Research is great!), so I was eager to try out some analyses with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab. Here is an example of one of the videos from the collection: The video quality is not very good, so I had my doubts about what I could find....
This is primarily a note to self post, but could hopefully also be useful for others. At least, I spent a little too long to figure out to embed a YouTube video with a specific language on the subtitles. The starting point is that I had this project video that I wanted to embed on a project website: However, then I found that you can add info about the specific language you want to use by adding this snippet after the URL:...
I am presenting at the Norwegian Forskerutdanningskonferansen on Monday, which is a venue for people involved in research education. I have been challenged to talk about why open research is better research. In the spirit of openness, this blog post is an attempt to shape my argument. It can be read as an open notebook for what I am going to say. Open Research vs Open Science My first point in any talk about open research is to explain why I think “open research” is better than “open science”....
Several people have argued that we should change from having a page limit (2/4/6 pages) for NIME paper submissions to a word limit instead. It has also been argued that references should not be counted as part of the text. However, what should the word limits be? It is always good to look at the history, so I decided to check how long previous NIME papers have been. I started by exporting the text from all of the PDF files with the pdftotext command-line utility:...