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: ...
Like many others, I bought a kayak during the pandemic, and I have had many nice trips in the Oslo fiord over the last year. Working at RITMO, I think a lot about rhythm these days, and the rhythmic nature of kayaking made me curious to investigate the pattern a little more. Capturing kayaking motion My spontaneous investigations into kayak motion began with simply recording a short video of myself kayaking. This was done by placing an action camera (a GoPro Hero 8, to be precise) on my life vest. The result looks like this: ...
After several years in the making, we finally “released” the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python at the NordicSMC Conference this week. The toolbox is a collection of modules targeted at researchers working with video recordings. Below is a short video in which Bálint Laczkó and I briefly describe the toolbox: https://youtu.be/tZVX\_lDFrwc About MGT for Python The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python includes video visualization techniques such as creating motion videos, motion history images, and motiongrams. These visualizations allow for studying video recordings from different temporal and spatial perspectives. The toolbox also includes basic computer vision methods, and it is designed to integrate well with audio analysis toolboxes. ...
Sometimes, there is a need to convert an audio file into a blank video file with an audio track. This can be useful if you are on a system that does not have a dedicated audio player but a video player (yes, rare, but I work with odd technologies…). Here is a quick recipe FFmpeg to the rescue When it comes to converting from one media format to another, I always turn to FFmpeg. It requires “coding” in the terminal, but usually, it is only necessary to write a oneliner. When it comes to converting an audio file (say in .WAV format) to a blank video file (for example, a .AVI file), this is how I would do it: ...
We are organizing the Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop at RITMO next week. As mentioned in another blog post, we have asked presenters to send us pre-recorded videos. They are all available on the workshop page. During the workshop, we will play sets of videos in sequence. When doing a test run today, we discovered that the sound levels differed wildly between files. There is clearly the need for normalizing the sound levels to create a good listener experience. ...
When working with various types of video analysis, I often end up with video files without audio. So I need to add the audio track by copying either from the source video file or from a separate audio file. There are many ways of doing this. Many people would probably reach for a video editor, but the problem is that you would most likely end up recompressing both the audio and video file. A better solution is to use FFmpeg, the swizz-army knife of video processing. ...
I have recently played with AudioStellar, a great tool for “sound object”-based exploration and musicking. It reminds me of CataRT, a great tool for concatenative synthesis. I used CataRT quite a lot previously, for example, in the piece Transformation. However, after I switched to Ubuntu and PD instead of OS X and Max, CataRT was no longer an option. So I got very excited when I discovered AudioStellar some weeks ago. It is lightweight and cross-platform and has some novel features that I would like to explore more in the coming weeks. ...
Many people have asked me about what types of microphones to use for streaming and recording. This is really a jungle, with lots of devices and things to think about. I have written some blog posts about such things previously, such as tips for doing Skype job interviews, testing simple camera/mic solutions, running a Hybrid Disputation, and how to work with plug-in-power microphones. Earlier today I held a short presentation about microphones at RITMO. This was during our informal Food & Paper lunch seminar, where people eat their lunch while listening to presentations about different topics (usually something academic, but sometimes also other things). Here is a cut-down version of the presentation: ...
In my ever-growing collection of smart FFmpeg tricks, here is a way of converting from one container format to another. Here I will convert from a QuickTime (.mov) file to a standard MPEG-4 (.mp4), but the recipe should work between other formats too. If you came here to just see the solution, here you go: ffmpeg -i infile.mov -acodec copy -vcodec copy outfile.mp4 In the following I will explain everything in a little more detail. ...
{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. ...