This blog post summarizes my experimentation with improving the quality of the PDF files in the proceedings of the annual International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). Centralized archive We have, over the last few years, worked hard on getting the NIME adequately archived. Previously, the files were scattered on each year’s conference web site. The first step was to create a central archive on nime.org. The list there is automagically generated from a collection of publicly available BibTeX files that serve as the master document of the proceedings archive....

I have previously written about a shell script) for compressing PDF files in Ubuntu. Here are some variants of the script. Low, mid, and high resolution Low resolution for screen: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf I prefer the “ebook” mode, which has slightly higher resolution: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf And then there is the high resolution for printing: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out....

During the NIME conference this year (which as run entirely online due to the coronavirus crisis), I led a workshop called NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop. In this post, I will explain the background of the workshop, how it was run in an asynchronous+synchronous mode, and reflect on the results. If you don’t want to read everything below, here is a short introduction video I made to explain the background (shot at my “summer office” up in the Hardangervidda mountain range in Norway):...

After several years of hard work, we are very happy to announce a new publication coming out of the MICRO project that I am leading: Headphones or Speakers? An Exploratory Study of Their Effects on Spontaneous Body Movement to Rhythmic Music (Frontiers Psychology). This is the first journal article of my PhD student Agata Zelechowska, and it reports on a standstill study conducted a couple of years ago. It is slightly different than the paradigm we have used for the Championships of Standstill....

I am a big supporter of Open Access publishing, but for various reasons some of my publications are not openly available by default. This is the case for the chapter Methods for Studying Music-Related Body Motion that I have contributed to the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology. I am very happy to announce that the embargo on the book ran out today, which means that a pre-print version of my chapter is finally freely available in UiO’s digital repository....

Continuing my explorations of FFmpeg for video visualization, today I came across this very nice blog post on creating “pixel array” images of videos. Here the idea is to reduce every single frame into only one pixel, and to plot this next to each other on a line. Of course, I wanted to try this out myself. I find that creating motiongrams or videograms is a good way to visualize the content of videos....

{width=“300”} This is a note to self, and could potentially also be useful to others in need of converting “old-school” MPEG-2 files into more modern MPEG-4 files using FFmpeg. In the fourMs lab we have a bunch of Canon XF105 video cameras that record .MXF files with MPEG-2 compression. This is not a very useful format for other things we are doing, so I often have to recompress them to something else....

Very many people are currently moving to video-based meetings. For that reason I have written up some quick advise on how to improve your setup. This is based on my interview advise, but grouped differently. Network {width=“200” height=“100”} The first important thing is to have as good a network as you can. Video conferencing requires a lot of bandwidth, so even though your e-mail and regular browsing works fine, it may still not be sufficient for good video transmission....

I am continuing my explorations of the great terminal-based video tool FFmpeg. Now I wanted to see if I could “flatten” a 360-degree video recorded with a Ricoh Theta camera. These cameras contain two fisheye lenses, capturing two 180-degree videos next to each other. This results in video files like the one I show a screenshot of below. These files are not very useful to watch or work with, so we need to somehow “flatten” them into a more meaningful video file....

I am happy to announce a new version of VideoAnalysis, a standalone application for OSX and Windows for creating visualizations and extract motion features from video files. VideoAnalysis was developed as a standalone version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox. I began working on the toolbox back in 2004, as a collection of modules for Max/MSP/Jitter. Then some people asked me to make a standalone version with some of the core functionality....