Book

I am happy to announce that my book Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments is now published! I am also thrilled that this is an open access book, meaning that is free to download and read. You are, of course, also welcome to pick up a paper copy! Here is a quick video summary of the book’s content: In the book, I combine perspectives from embodied music cognition and interactive music technology. The approach is what I call “embodied music technology”. ...

I sent off the final proofs for my Sound Actions book before the summer. I don’t know when it will actually be published, but since it is off my table, I have had time to work on new projects. My new project AMBIENT will start soon, but I still haven’t been able to write up all the results from my two projects on music-related micro-motion: Sverm and MICRO. This will be the topic of the book I have started writing this summer, with the working title Still Standing: Exploring Human Micromotion. ...

Ever since I finished my dissertation in 2007, I have thought about writing it up as a book. Parts of the dissertation were translated and extended in the Norwegian-language textbook Musikk og bevegelse (which, by the way, is out of print but freely available as an ebook). That book focused primarily on music-related body motion and was written for the course MUS2006 at the University of Oslo. However, my action-sound theory was only partially mentioned and never properly presented in a book format. ...

Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same. Starting school, starting university, starting a new job, starting a new project. It is always a feeling of something large and unknown that is approaching. ...

I am happy to announce the publication of the new book Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning edited by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (2009). The book is published by Routledge and was released last Friday, although it may take a few days before it hits the book shelves (including Amazon). The book is based on research carried out in the EU COST Action 287 ConGAS (Gesture controlled audio systems) that ran from 2004 to 2007. I have contributed a chapter called Musical Gestures: concepts and methods in research, co-authored with Marcelo M. Wanderley, Rolf Inge Godøy, and Marc Leman. ...

I have had several requests from people outside of Norway that want to buy my book. Aparently, Akademika only ships to Norway, but Haugen bok does ship to the rest of the world. So if you are living outside of Norway, this is the place to go.

Over the last year I have been working on a text book based on my dissertation. It started out as a translation of my dissertation into Norwegian, but I quickly realized that an educational text is much more useful. So in practice I have written a totally new book, although it is drawing on research from my dissertation. The title of the book is Musikk og bevegelse (Music and movement) and that is exactly what it is about. It goes through theory, various methodological approaches, and a bunch of examples of music-related movements in performance and perception. Over the summer I finally had enough time to finish the text, and now everything is sent off to the publisher. Hopefully the book will be out in due time for Christmas… ...

My dissertation came from the printing company yesterday. Here’s a picture of some of them: It feels a bit weird to see the final book lying there, being the result of a year of planning and three years of hard work. I wrote most of it last spring, submitting the manuscript in July. Now, about half a year later, I have a much more distant relationship to the whole thing. Seeing the final result is comforting, but it is also sad to let go. I enjoyed working on the project, and I will continue to work on a related topic, but still it feels like it will never really be the same. I guess that’s the point of doing a PhD, to succeed climbing up a ladder and to start exploring from there.