Action

I am on vacation in northern Chile and encountered an interesting staircase in one of our hotels. The uppermost step was a little higher than the others, causing the whole family to stumble almost every time we passed it on the way upwards. Similarly, we always got a few extra centimeters when walking down, making us almost fall over when starting the escalation. This staircase reminded me about action programs, the anticipation of actions based on a perceived rhythm. In this case, the rhythmic nature of the steps of the staircase. Based on ecological knowledge about how staircases typically work, with equally displaced steps, one predicts the actions to climb the staircase. However, when this rhythm is broken, due to one step being slightly higher than the others, it breaks with our prediction. After almost stumbling several times, we began getting used to it, but it still felt weird each time.

One month has passed of the year and my sound action project. I didn’t know how it would develop when I started and have found it both challenging and inspiring. It has also engaged people around me more than I had expected. Each day I upload one new video recording to YouTube and post a link on Twitter. If you want to look at the whole collection, it is probably better to check out this playlist: ...

Yesterday, I presented my microinteraction paper here at the NIME conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), organised at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Today I am presenting a poster based on a paper written together with two of my colleagues at UiO. Title MuMYO - Evaluating and Exploring the MYO Armband for Musical Interaction Authors Kristian Nymoen, Mari Romarheim Haugen, Alexander Refsum Jensenius ...

This week I am participating at the NIME conference, organised at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am doing some administrative work as chair of the NIME steering committee, and I am also happy to present a paper tomorrow: Title To Gesture or Not? An Analysis of Terminology in NIME Proceedings 2001–2013 Links Paper (PDF) Presentation (HTML) Spreadsheet with summary of data (ODS) OS X shell script used for analysis Abstract The term ‘gesture’ has represented a buzzword in the NIME community since the beginning of its conference series. But how often is it actually used, what is it used to describe, and how does its usage here differ from its usage in other fields of study? This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the motion-related terminology used in all of the papers published in the NIME conference proceedings to date (2001– 2013). The results show that ‘gesture’ is in fact used in 62 % of all NIME papers, which is a significantly higher percentage than in other music conferences (ICMC and SMC), and much more frequently than it is used in the HCI and biomechanics communities. The results from a collocation analysis support the claim that ‘gesture’ is used broadly in the NIME community, and indicate that it ranges from the description of concrete human motion and system control to quite metaphorical applications. ...

My paper titled An action–sound approach to teaching interactive music has recently been published by Organised Sound. The paper is based on some of the theoretical ideas on action-sound couplings developed in my PhD, combined with how I designed the course Interactive Music based on such an approach to music technology. **Abstract **The conceptual starting point for an `action-sound approach’ to teaching music technology is the acknowledgment of the couplings that exist in acoustic instruments between sounding objects, sound-producing actions and the resultant sounds themselves. Digital music technologies, on the other hand, are not limited to such natural couplings, but allow for arbitrary new relationships to be created between objects, actions and sounds. The endless possibilities of such virtual action-sound relationships can be exciting and creatively inspiring, but they can also lead to frustration among performers and confusion for audiences. This paper presents the theoretical foundations for an action-sound approach to electronic instrument design and discusses the ways in which this approach has shaped the undergraduate course titled `Interactive Music’ at the University of Oslo. In this course, students start out by exploring various types of acoustic action-sound couplings before moving on to designing, building, performing and evaluating both analogue and digital electronic instruments from an action-sound perspective. ...

I have been discussing definitions of the terms motion/movement, action and gesture several times before on this blog (for example here and here). Here is a summary of my current take on these three concepts: Motion: displacement of an object in space over time. This object could be a hand, a foot, a mobile phone, a rod, whatever. Motion is an objective entity, and can be recorded with a motion capture system. A motion capture system could be anything from a simple slider (1-dimensional), to a mouse (2-dimensional), to a camera-based tracking system ((3-dimensional) or an inertial system (6-dimensional: 3D position and 3D orientation). I have previously also discussed the difference between motion and movement. Since motion is a continuous phenomenon, it does not make sense to talk about it in plural form: “motions”. Then it makes more sense to talk about one or more motion sequences, but most probably it makes even more sense to talk about individual actions. ...

Yesterday, Jeroen Arendsen introduced me to the concept of fidgeting, the stuff that happens in between actions/gestures in a continuous flux of movement. I have been looking for a good word to describe this type of movement (which I have been calling “movement-noise”), and I am happy to finally have a better word for it. I made a small sketch showing how fidgeting fits into my movement-flux diagram to celebrate the new discovery: ...

Ok, so I have been discussing the concepts of movement, action and gesture with various people since I posted this entry, and I have come to disagree with myself. Marcelo Wanderley pointed out that an action doesn’t necessarily have to involve a movement, as touch and other types of manipulation should also be considered an action. After all, holding down the keys on a piano after the attack results in no movement, but it is certainly an action. ...

Just to clarify: I am using the term action to denote chunks of movement: Action is thus highly subjective, it is just a mental construct (for either the performer or perceiver, or both) of chunks in the continuous flux of movement. Acknowledging the fact that our brain is working at multiple speeds and resolutions, there could also be actions that are chunks of smaller actions. ...

Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit. This involves perceptual chunking on either the performers and/or the perceiver’s side. ...