Design

Today, we will have a workshop with the MishMash work package leaders, and for that I thought it would be useful to run a new version of the RITMO coauthorship exercise. The goal is to make contribution expectations explicit early, and to practice making fair decisions when contributions differ in type, timing, and visibility. Since MishMash embraces both artistic and scientific research and development, this version is designed for teams working across arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, design, and engineering. ...

Many students conflate research design, protocol, and methods. This post aims to clarify these foundational concepts. Research Design A research design is the overarching blueprint for a scientific study. It outlines how you will collect, measure, and analyze data to answer your research question. Common designs include: Experimental Designs: Researchers manipulate variables to observe effects. For example, randomly assigning participants to listen to different genres of music and measuring their mood or cognitive performance. ...

I am happy to announce the publication of the anthology Sonic Design- Explorations Between Art and Science.This 17-chapter volume explores sonic design practice and theory and celebrates the lifelong achievements of Professor Rolf Inge Godøy. The anthology is based on selected contributions at the International Seminar on Sonic Design, which took place in May 2022. The seminar was set up to celebrate Rolf Inge Godøy, my former supervisor, mentor, colleague and friend, uphon his retirement. After working closely with him for more than two decades, I wanted to bring together different perspectives I know he cares about. When I first approached him as a master’s student, I remember how he spoke about composition as “sonic design”. Thus, it became a natural term for both the seminar and the anthology (I have previously written about the difference between sound design and sonic design). ...

What is the difference between “sound design” and “sonic design”? This is one of the many questions I have pondered while preparing the International Seminar on Sonic Design the last half year. My idea with using the term “sonic design” for the seminar was inspired by Professor Rolf Inge Godøy, my former supervisor, mentor, colleague and friend, to whom the seminar was dedicated. With his background in music performance and composition, he always talked about how musicians and composers “shape” sound through their practice. They “design” sound with their bodies. ...

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 **Abstract **The MYO armband from Thalmic Labs is a complete and wireless motion and muscle sensing platform. This paper evaluates the armband’s sensors and its potential for NIME applications. This is followed by a presentation of the prototype instrument MuMYO. We conclude that, despite some shortcomings, the armband has potential of becoming a new “standard” controller in the NIME community. ...

Nowadays I have a hard time deciding on what type of application to use. Only a few years back I would use desktop applications for most things, but with the growing amount of decent web 2.0 “applications” I notice that I have slowly moved towards doing more and more online. Let me use this blog as an example. It is based on WordPress, which now offers a good and efficient web interface. However, it just doesn’t feel as snappy as a desktop application. A few years back I used MarsEdit for all my blog writing, but for some reason (I can’t remember exactly when) I decided to use the WordPress web interface for blog writing instead. ...

{.imagelink}Eduardo Miranda and Marcelo M. Wanderley have just released a new book called New Digital Musical Instruments: Control and Interaction Beyond the Keyboard. The chapters are: - Musical Gestures: Acquisition and Mapping Gestural Controllers Sensors and Sensor-to-Computer Interfaces Biosignal Interfaces Toward Intelligent Musical Instruments So far most publications in this field have been in conference proceedings, so it is great to have a book that can be used in teaching.

Peter Robinson (University of Cambridge) are working on emotionally intelligent interfaces, and have made a setup for a summer show at a science museum in London where they can track 20 different types of emotional responses using computer vision: Can you read minds? The answer is most likely ‘yes’. You may not consider it mind reading but our ability to understand what people are thinking and feeling from their facial expressions and gestures is just that. People express their mental states all the time through facial expressions, vocal nuances and gestures. We have built this ability into computers to make them emotionally aware.

We have started a collaboration between between UiO and AHO, and some of the music technology students followed courses with the interaction designers at AHO this spring semester. This was a great success, and I was impressed with what came out of it. Henrik Marstrander has worked on a table interface where he can control various musical parameters, and Jon Olav Eikenes and Marie Wennesland has made a multi-touch multi-touch interface modelled after Jeff Han.

Nils showed me this nice picture site called DesignKlicks from Spiegel Online. It is this 3d-picture space where you can move around and look at similar pictures. Unfortunately it is based on keyword descriptions and not on picture content. I really look forward to the day we get picture (and also music and video) browsers like this working on media content itself.