Tag: motion

New run of Music Moves

I am happy to announce a new run (the 6th) of our free online course Music Moves: Why Does Music Make You Move?. Here is a 1-minute welcome that I recorded for Twitter:

The course starts on Monday (25 January 2021) and will run for six weeks. In the course, you will learn about the psychology of music and movement, and how researchers study music-related movements, with this free online course.

We developed the course 5 years ago, but the content is still valid. I also try to keep it up to date by recording new weekly wrap-ups with interviews with researchers around here at UiO.

I highly recommend joining the course on FutureLearn, that is the only way to get all the content, including videos, articles, quizzes, and, most importantly, the dialogue with other learners. But if you are only interested in watching videos, all of them are available on this UiO page and this YouTube playlist.

Method chapter freely available

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. This chapter is a summary of my experiences with music-related motion analysis, and I often recommend it to students. Therefore it is great that it is finally available to download from everywhere.

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of some methodological approaches and technologies that can be used in the study of music-related body motion. The aim is not to cover all possible approaches, but rather to highlight some of the ones that are more relevant from a musicological point of view. This includes methods for video-based and sensor-based motion analyses, both qualitative and quantitative. It also includes discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods, and reflections on how the methods can be used in connection to other data in question, such as physiological or neurological data, symbolic notation, sound recordings and contextual data.

New Publication: Analyzing Free-Hand Sound-Tracings of Melodic Phrases

We have done several sound-tracing studies before at University of Oslo, and here is a new one focusing on free-hand sound-tracings of melodies. I am happy to say that this is a gold open access publication, and that all the data are also available. So it is both free and “free”!

Kelkar, Tesjaswinee; Jensenius, Alexander Refsum
Analyzing Free-Hand Sound-Tracings of Melodic Phrases
Applied Sciences 2018, 8, 135. (Special Issue Sound and Music Computing)
View Full-Text | Download PDF |

In this paper, we report on a free-hand motion capture study in which 32 participants ‘traced’ 16 melodic vocal phrases with their hands in the air in two experimental conditions. Melodic contours are often thought of as correlated with vertical movement (up and down) in time, and this was also our initial expectation. We did find an arch shape for most of the tracings, although this did not correspond directly to the melodic contours. Furthermore, representation of pitch in the vertical dimension was but one of a diverse range of movement strategies used to trace the melodies. Six different mapping strategies were observed, and these strategies have been quantified and statistically tested. The conclusion is that metaphorical representation is much more common than a ‘graph-like’ rendering for such a melodic sound-tracing task. Other findings include a clear gender difference for some of the tracing strategies and an unexpected representation of melodies in terms of a small object for some of the Hindustani music examples. The data also show a tendency of participants moving within a shared ‘social box’.

Come work with me! Lots of new positions at University of Oslo

I recently mentioned that I have been busy setting up the new MCT master’s programme. But I have been even more busy with preparing the startup of our new Centre of Excellence RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. This is a large undertaking, and a collaboration between researchers from musicology, psychology and informatics. A visual “abstract” of the centre can be seen in the figure to the right.

Now we are recruiting lots of new people for the centre, so please apply or forward to people you think may be interested:

And we’re off: RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion

I am happy to announce that RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion officially started last week. This is a new centre of excellence funding by the Research Council of Norway.

Even though we have formally taken off, this mainly means that the management group has started to work. Establishing a centre with 50-60 researchers is not done in a few days, so we will more or less spend the coming year to get up to speed. The plan is that the faculty group will begin working together from January, while in parallel recruiting PhD and postdoctoral fellows. We aim at moving into our new spaces and having most of the people in place by August 2018, and that is also when we will have the kick-off party.

At least we now have a small web page up and running, and more content will be added as we move along. Here is a short summary of what we will be working on:

RITMO is an interdisciplinary research centre focused on rhythm as a structuring mechanism for the temporal dimensions of human life.
The research will be highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from musicology, psychology and informatics to study rhythm as a fundamental property that shapes and underpins human cognition, behaviour and culture.

Rhythm is omnipresent in human life, as we walk, talk, dance and play; as we tell stories about our past; and as we predict the future. Rhythm is also central to human biology, from the oscillations of our nervous system to our heartbeats, breathing patterns and longer chronobiological cycles. As such, it is a key aspect of human action and perception that is in complex interplay with the various cultural, biological and mechanical rhythms of the world.

RITMO will undertake research on rhythm in human action and perception, using music, motion and audio-visual media as empirical points of departure. Our core idea is that the human ability to experience the world and our actions as rhythmic, points to a basic cognitive mechanism that is in itself rhythmic in nature. The vision of RITMO is to understand more about this cognitive mechanism, and through this generate ground-breaking knowledge about the ways in which humans structure and understand the temporal dimensions of their life.

The centre is interdisciplinary and will combine perspectives and methods from music and media studies, philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, and informatics, using state-of-the-art technologies for motion capture, neuroimaging, pupillometry and robotics.

RITMO is to reveal the basic cognitive mechanism(s) underlying human rhythm, using music, motion and audiovisual media as empirical points of departure.

The research will be highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from musicology, psychology and informatics to study rhythm as a fundamental property that shapes and underpins human cognition, behaviour and culture.