Tag: motion

Try not to headbang challenge

I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012.

Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge:

As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still. Running the video through the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python, it is possible to see when and how much they moved clearly.

Below is a quick visualization of the 11-minute long sequence. The videogram (similar to a motiongram but of the original video) shows quite a lot of motion throughout. There is no headbanging, but they do not sit still.

A videogram of the complete video recording (top) with a waveform of the audio track. Two selected frames from the sequence and “zoomed-in” videograms show the motion of specific passages.

There are many good musical examples listed here. We should consider some of them for our next standstill championship. If corona allows, we plan to run a European Championship of Standstill in May 2022. More information soon!

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:

Our new run of Music Moves starts on Monday. Sign up to learn more about why and how music makes us move. Free, 3 hours per week for 6 weeks. @FLmusicmoves @UniOslo https://t.co/k0gk6gkma5 pic.twitter.com/yqo563RDdV
— Alexander Refsum Jensenius (@alexarje) January 19, 2021

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: