I wrote up the final report on the project MICRO - Human Bodily Micromotion in Music Perception and Interaction before Christmas. Now I finally got around to wrapping up the project pages. With the touch of a button, the project’s web page now says “completed”. But even though the project is formally over, its results will live on. Aims and objectives The MICRO project sought to investigate the close relationships between musical sound and human bodily micromotion.

Many people talk about “opening” the research process these days. Due to initiatives like Plan S, much has happened when it comes to Open Access to research publications. There are also things happening when it comes to sharing data openly (or at least FAIR). Unfortunately, there is currently more talking about Open Research than doing. At RITMO, we are actively exploring different strategies for opening our research. The most extreme case is that of MusicLab.

Not only do we have a new Department video, but we have also made a short video documentary about our fourMs group. It is in Norwegian (subtitles coming soon), but even though you do not understand the language, the video has lots of nice shots from the labs and the background music is made by Professor Rolf Inge Godøy.

New publication: **Title ** Analyzing correspondence between sound objects and body motion Authors Kristian Nymoen, Rolf Inge Godøy, Alexander Refsum Jensenius and Jim Tørresen has now been published in ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. Abstract Links between music and body motion can be studied through experiments called sound-tracing. One of the main challenges in such research is to develop robust analysis techniques that are able to deal with the multidimensional data that musical sound and body motion present.

Earlier this year, before I started as head of department, I was working on a non-realtime implementation of my sonomotiongram technique (a sonomotiongram is a sonic display of motion from a video recording, created by sonifying a motiongram). Now I finally found some time to wrap it up and make it available as an OSX application called ImageSonifyer. The Max patch is also available, for those that want to look at what is going on.

[caption id=“attachment_2086” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Alexander holding a keynote lecture at Musikkteknologidagene 2012 (Photo: Nathan Wolek).[/caption] Last week I held a keynote lecture at the Norwegian music technology conference Musikkteknologidagene, by (and at) the Norwegian Academy of Music and NOTAM. The talk was titled: “Embodying the human body in music technology”, and was an attempt at explaining why I believe we need to put more emphasis on human-friendly technologies, and why the field of music cognition is very much connected to that of music technology.

Over the years we have uploaded various videos to YouTube of our fourMs lab activities. Some of these videos have been uploaded using a shared YouTube user, others by myself and others. I just realised that a good solution for gathering all the different videos is just to create a playlist, and then add all relevant videos there. Then it should also be possible to embed this playlist in web pages, like below:

Kristian Nymoen have updated the Jamoma modules for recording and playing back GDIF data in Max 5. The modules are based on the FTM library (beta 12, 13-15 does not work), and can be downloaded here. We have also made available three use cases in the (soon to be expanded) fourMs database: simple mouse recording, sound saber and a short piano example. See the video below for a quick demonstration of how it works:

We have set up a new wiki for the fourMs lab. It is mainly intended as a place for tutorials and various tricks and tips in using the software and hardware systems available. Hopefully, the wiki can also be useful for other researchers in the field.

A journalist from the national broadcaster NRK came to our opening on Friday, and he made a story which was shown on the “cultural news” Friday night. The clip can be seen here (in Norwegian). Below is an image of Rolf Inge Godøy being interviewed before the opening.

We have slowly been moving into our new lab spaces over the last weeks. The official opening of the labs is scheduled for Friday 26 September, but we had a pre-opening “Open lab” for the new music students last week, and here are some of the pictures shot by Anne Cathrine Wesnes during the presentation. Here I am telling the students a little about our new research group, and showing the main room: