Interdisciplinarity

At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities. Music technologists have different types of backgrounds and work in many different institutions. RITMO has music technologists from musicology (the Faculty of Humanities) and informatics (the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences). The latter builds on what I call a paper proceedings publication culture. Informatics, computer science, and various types of engineering are fast-moving fields that often publish in what is called “conference proceedings”. ...

Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There I introduced a figure that I regularly receive permission requests to republish (which I always give, in the spirit of open research). The challenge with the previous blog post has been that I based my figure on a combination of a textual description by Stember and a more limited figure by Zeigler. This led to inconsistency when it comes to two of the disciplinarities: cross and multi. That is because the figure and the textual description do not match up. ...

There is much focus on Open Data these days, an important part of the Open Research “puzzle”. A much less talked about part, but one that I think deserves more attention, is the role of blogging in the academic research landscape. Blogging Isn’t Dead Some people say that the blog is dead. True, the advent of social media platforms has taken over a lot of the activity that you would previously have found in blog posts. However, even though many things have changed, I still think that the blogging format is useful. ...

At the NordicSMC conference last week, I was part of a panel discussing the topic Rigorous Empirical Evaluation of SMC Research. This was the original description of the session: The goal of this session is to share, discuss, and appraise the topic of evaluation in the context of SMC research and development. Evaluation is a cornerstone of every scientific research domain, but is a complex subject in our context due to the interdisciplinary nature of SMC coupled with the subjectivity involved in assessing creative endeavours. As SMC research proliferates across the world, the relevance of robust, rigorous empirical evaluation is ever-increasing in the academic and industrial realms. The session will begin with presentations from representatives of NordicSMC member universities, followed by a more free-flowing discussion among these panel members, followed by audience involvement. ...

I have in a previous blog post argued that universities should be structured as a matrix organization to allow for interdisciplinary collaboration. That blog post was written after I had been Head of the Department of Musicology for four years. At the time, I was slightly frustrated about the challenges we faced with “silos” within the university. Many initiatives were halted due to the university’s organizational structure, which is divided into faculties and departments. My thought was that a matrix organization could be a way to solve the problem. ...

This year’s Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Conference has opened for virtual lab tours. When we cannot travel to visit each other, this is a great way to showcase how things look and what we are working on. Stefano Fasciani and I teamed up a couple of weeks ago to walk around some of the labs and studios at the Department of Musicology and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion. We started in the Portal used for the Music, Communication & Technology master’s programme and ended up in the fourMs Lab. ...

After a year of primarily online activities, we are slowly preparing for a new reality at the university. We will not go back to where we left off, but what will the new university be? The front page of the EUA report Universities without walls. This post is inspired by a tweet by Rikke Toft Nørgård and a presentation she held on the development of the post-pandemic hybrid university. In the presentation, she points to a recent EUA report envisioning how universities should develop towards 2030. The aim is that universities should be: ...

I am super excited about our new Nordic Sound and Music Computing Network, which has just started up with funding from the Nordic Research Council. This network brings together a group of internationally leading sound and music computing researchers from institutions in five Nordic countries: Aalborg University, Aalto University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of Iceland, and University of Oslo. The network covers the field of sound and music from the “soft” to the “hard,” including the arts and humanities, and the social and natural sciences, as well as engineering, and involves a high level of technological competency. ...

I recently mentioned that I have been busy setting up the new MCT master’s programme. But I have been even more busy with preparing the startup of our new Centre of Excellence RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. This is a large undertaking, and a collaboration between researchers from musicology, psychology and informatics. A visual “abstract” of the centre can be seen in the figure to the right. ...

I am happy to announce that RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion officially started last week. This is a new centre of excellence funding by the Research Council of Norway. Even though we have formally taken off, this mainly means that the management group has started to work. Establishing a centre with 50-60 researchers is not done in a few days, so we will more or less spend the coming year to get up to speed. The plan is that the faculty group will begin working together from January, while in parallel recruiting PhD and postdoctoral fellows. We aim at moving into our new spaces and having most of the people in place by August 2018, and that is also when we will have the kick-off party. ...