Concert

I am happy to announce that a paper I wrote together with Victoria Johnson has just been published in Computer Music Journal. The paper is based on the experiences that Victoria and I gained while working on the piece Transformation for electric violin and live electronics (see video of the piece below). Citation A. R. Jensenius and V. Johnson. Performing the electric violin in a sonic space. Computer Music Journal, 36(4):28–39, 2012. **Abstract **This article presents the development of the improvisation piece Transformation for electric violin and live electronics. The aim of the project was to develop an “invisible” technological setup that would allow the performer to move freely on stage while still being in full control of the electronics. The developed system consists of a video-based motion-tracking system, with a camera hanging in the ceiling above the stage. The performer’s motion and position on stage is used to control the playback of sonic fragments from a database of violin sounds, using concatenative synthesis as the sound engine. The setup allows the performer to improvise freely together with the electronic sounds being played back as she moves around the “sonic space.” The system has been stable in rehearsal and performance, and the simplicity of the approach has been inspiring to both the performer and the audience. ...

Yesterday, I performed with the Norwegian Noise Orchestra at Betong in Oslo, at a concert organised by Dans for Voksne. The orchestra is an ad-hoc group of noisy improvisers, and I immediately felt at home. The performance lasted for 12 hours, from noon to midnight, and I performed for two hours in the afternoon. For the performance I used my Soniperforma patch based on the sonifyer technique and the Jamoma module I developed a couple of years ago (jmod.sonifyer~). The technique is based on creating a motion image from the live camera input (the webcam of my laptop in this case), and use this to draw a motiongram over time, which again is converted to sound through an “inverse FFT” process. ...

Victoria Johnson has posted a video of the performance of our piece Transformation on Youtube: The video is from Victoria’s final performance as part of her research fellowship in the arts(PhD-equivalent), which happened Monday 28 March 2011 at the Norwegian Academy of Music. As I wrote earlier this year: Transformation a piece where we are using video analysis to control sound selection and spatialisation. We have been developing the setup and piece during the last couple of years, and performed variations of the piece at MIC, the Opera house and at the music academy last year. ...

Participating in the Open Form rehearsals and workshops has been very interesting (as previously mentioned here). One thing has puzzled me over the last few days: the lack of focusing on the musical objects. I use musical object to denote a coherent entity consisting of sounding objects (in a Schaefferian sense) but also all the other modalities (in my case particularly visual and haptic features). The musical object is a rather short entity, typically in the range between 1-5 seconds, but sometimes shorter or longer. After reading Schaeffer, Stern, Godøy and others, and my own work on short term music recognition, I have come to believe that this is both the most interesting unit in terms of performance and perception of music. ...

[]{.imagelink}Dagsavisen wrote a story about the experimental concert I played with Kjell Tore Innervik (quarter tone marimba) and Arve Henriksen (trumpet). I had brought down a bunch of equipment from my office to the Music Academy, including a couple of music balls, a Lemur, game controllers and some video cameras. It took a couple of days to get everything up and running, but it has been great fun to make everything work and explore the musical possibilities. ...

Last week I performed my master exam concert at the Department of Music and Theatre, University of Oslo. The program consisted of improvisations for piano and live electronics. Different MIDI, audio, and video processing techniques were used. Here I describe the different pieces. Performa It is incredible how many exciting sounds one can get from a piano, and mallets are a nice change from playing on the keys. The computer helps with temporal adjustments and background sounds. ...