Disputation

Yesterday, I gave some PhD dissertation advice. Today, I will present some tips for PhD candidates ready for public defense. In Norway, the public defense is a formal event with colleagues, friends, and family present—we typically also stream them on YouTube. The good thing is that when you are ready for the defense, the dissertation has already been accepted. Now it is time to show lecturing skills in the trial lecture and the ability to engage with peers in the disputation. ...

Last week, Ulf Holbrook defended his dissertation at RITMO. I was in charge of streaming the disputation, and here are some reflections on the technical setup and streaming. Zoom Webinars vs YouTube Streaming I have previously written about running a hybrid disputation using a Zoom webinar. We have used variations of that setup also for other events. For example, last year, we ran RPPW as a hybrid conference. There are some benefits of using Zoom, particularly when having many presenters. Zoom rooms are the best for small groups where everyone should be able to participate. For larger groups, and particularly (semi-)public events, Zoom Webinars are the only viable solution. I had only experienced Zoom bombing once (when someone else organised a public event with more than 100 people present), which was an unpleasant experience. That is why we have run all our public events using Zoom Webinars, where we have more fine-grained control of who is allowed to talk and share their video and screen. ...

I have been running the disputation of Guilherme Schmidt Câmara today. At RITMO, we have accepted that “hybrid mode” will be the new normal. So also for disputations. Fortunately, we had already many years of experience with video conferencing before the corona crisis hit. We have also gained lots of experience by running the Music, Communication and Technology master’s programme for some years. In another blog post, I summarized some experiences of running our first hybrid disputation. I have also written about running the Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop as a hybrid conference and how to successfully run a Zoom Webinar. ...

Yesterday, I wrote about Agata Zelechowska’s disputation. We decided to run it as a hybrid production, even though there was no audience present. It would, of course, have been easier to run it as an online-only event. However, we expect that hybrid is the new “normal” for such events, and therefore thought that it would be good to get started exploring the hybrid format right away. In this blog post, I will write up some of our experiences. ...

I am happy to announce that Agata Zelechowska yesterday successfully defended her PhD dissertation during a public disputation. The dissertation is titled Irresistible Movement: The Role of Musical Sound, Individual Differences and Listening Context in Movement Responses to Music and has been carried out as part of my MICRO project at RITMO. The dissertation is composed of five papers and an extended introduction. The abstract reads: ...

I am happy to announce that fourMs researcher Kristian Nymoen has successfully defended his PhD dissertation, and that the dissertation is now available in the DUO archive. I have had the pleasure of co-supervising Kristian’s project, and also to work closely with him on several of the papers included in the dissertation (and a few others). Reference K. Nymoen. Methods and Technologies for Analysing Links Between Musical Sound and Body Motion. PhD thesis, University of Oslo, 2013. Abstract There are strong indications that musical sound and body motion are related. For instance, musical sound is often the result of body motion in the form of sound-producing actions, and muscial sound may lead to body motion such as dance. The research presented in this dissertation is focused on technologies and methods of studying lower-level features of motion, and how people relate motion to sound. Two experiments on so-called sound-tracing, meaning representation of perceptual sound features through body motion, have been carried out and analysed quantitatively. The motion of a number of participants has been recorded using stateof- the-art motion capture technologies. In order to determine the quality of the data that has been recorded, these technologies themselves are also a subject of research in this thesis. A toolbox for storing and streaming music-related data is presented. This toolbox allows synchronised recording of motion capture data from several systems, independently of systemspecific characteristics like data types or sampling rates. The thesis presents evaluations of four motion tracking systems used in research on musicrelated body motion. They include the Xsens motion capture suit, optical infrared marker-based systems from NaturalPoint and Qualisys, as well as the inertial sensors of an iPod Touch. These systems cover a range of motion tracking technologies, from state-of-the-art to low-cost and ubiquitous mobile devices. Weaknesses and strengths of the various systems are pointed out, with a focus on applications for music performance and analysis of music-related motion. The process of extracting features from motion data is discussed in the thesis, along with motion features used in analysis of sound-tracing experiments, including time-varying features and global features. Features for realtime use are also discussed related to the development of a new motion-based musical instrument: The SoundSaber. Finally, four papers on sound-tracing experiments present results and methods of analysing people’s bodily responses to short sound objects. These papers cover two experiments, presenting various analytical approaches. In the first experiment participants moved a rod in the air to mimic the sound qualities in the motion of the rod. In the second experiment the participants held two handles and a different selection of sound stimuli was used. In both experiments optical infrared marker-based motion capture technology was used to record the motion. The links between sound and motion were analysed using four approaches. (1) A pattern recognition classifier was trained to classify sound-tracings, and the performance of the classifier was analysed to search for similarity in motion patterns exhibited by participants. (2) Spearman’s p correlation was applied to analyse the correlation between individual sound and motion features. (3) Canonical correlation analysis was applied in order to analyse correlations between combinations of sound features and motion features in the sound-tracing experiments. (4) Traditional statistical tests were applied to compare sound-tracing strategies between a variety of sounds and participants differing in levels of musical training. Since the individual analysis methods provide different perspectives on the links between sound and motion, the use of several methods of analysis is recommended to obtain a broad understanding of how sound may evoke bodily responses. ...

“Dr Air Guitar” has become my new nickname after an NRK feature story in connection to my disputation last week. This led to an overwhelming amount of media interest, with numerous newspaper articles, a handful of TV appearances, and a dozen radio interviews. It is strange how this air guitar thing became the main issue. We did do an air guitar study, but that was only one of several observation studies conducted in the Musical Gestures project that I have worked in. When speaking to journalists, I have tried to talk more generally about music and movement, but the titles have ended up with air guitar… The only exception is DN, who instead named me Doktor Riff! ...