Max

A couple of days ago, I read an interesting paper about a new AI algorithm that can summarize long texts. This is an attempt to solve the problem of tl;dr texts, meaning “too long, didn’t read”. The article reminded me that the same problem exists for music, in which case it would probably be tl;dl: “too long, didn’t listen”. I was interested in this topic back when I wrote my master’s thesis about short-term music recognition. One way to overcome the challenge of listening through full music tracks is by creating music “thumbnails”. That is, a compact representation of the most salient parts of the music in question. This is not a trivial task, of course, and lots of research have gone into it over the years. Strangely, though, I haven’t seen any of the many suggested algorithms implemented in any commercial service (so far). ...

I am involved in a student project which uses some Arduino Mega 2560 sensor interfaces in an interactive device. It has been a while since I worked with Arduinos myself, as I am mainly working with Belas these days. Also, I have never worked with the Mega before, so I had to look around a little to figure out how to set it up with Cycling ‘74’s Max. I have previously used Maxuino for interfacing Arduinos with Max. This is a general purpose tool, with a step by step approach to connecting to the Arduino and retrieving data. This is great when it works, but due to its many options, and a somewhat convoluted patching style, I found the patch quite difficult to debug when things did not work out of the box. ...

The Research Council of Norway is evaluating the research being done in the humanities these days, and all institutions were given the task to submit cases of how societal impact. Obviously, basic research is per definition not aiming at societal impact in the short run, and my research definitely falls into category.Still it is interesting to see that some of my basic research is, indeed, on the verge of making a societal impact in the sense that policy makers like to think about. So I submitted the impact case “From Music to Medicine”, based on the system Computer-based Infant Movement Assessment (CIMA). ...

](/images/2014/03/MultiControl_062.png) Screenshot of MultiControl v0.6.2 Today I have added MultiControl to my GitHub account. Inititally, I did not intend to release the source code for MultiControl, because it is so old and dirty. The whole patch is based on bpatchers and trying to hide things away in the pre-Max5-days, when presentation view did not exist. I originally developed the Max patch back in 2004, mainly so that I could distribute a standalone application for my students to use. I have only incrementally updated it to work with newer versions of Max and OS X, but have never really given it a full brush-over. ...

Today I will present the paper Non-Realtime Sonification of Motiongrams at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC) in Stockholm. The paper is based on a new implementation of my sonomotiongram technique, optimised for non-realtime use. I presented a realtime version of the sonomotiongram technique at ACHI 2012 and a Kinect version, the Kinectofon, at NIME earlier this year. The new paper presents the ImageSonifyer application and a collection of videos showing how it works. ...

I have recently started moving my development efforts over to GitHub, to keep everything in one place. Now I have also uploaded a small application I developed for a project by my mother, Norwegian sculptor Grete Refsum. She wanted to create a timelapse video of her making a new sculpture, “Hommage til kaffeselskapene”, for her installation piece Tante Vivi, fange nr. 24 127 Ravensbrück. ...

I am currently working on a paper describing some further exploration of the sonifyer technique and module that I have previously published on. The new thing is that I am now using the inputs from a Kinect device as the source material for the sonification, which opens up for using also the depth in the image as an element in the process. To be able to create figures for the paper, I needed to record the input from a Kinect to a regular video file. For that reason I have created a small Max patch called KinectRecorder, which allows for easy recording of one combined video file from the two inputs (regular video image and depth image) from the Kinect. As the screenshot below shows, there is not much more to the patch than starting the video input from the Kinect, and then start the recording. Files will be stored as with.jpg compression and named with the current date and time. ...

The Norwegian Academy of Music launched their new web page and logo today. As part of the visual profile, they wanted to create a dynamic logo, continuously reflecting the activities at the school. I was asked to contribute to making this new dynamic logo dynamic, and we ended up basing the system on analysis of the sound of the school. ...

MultiControl is by far the most popular software application I have created, as can be seen in the web traffic here on my site, and also on the download site at the University of Oslo where the app resides. This is a tiny application that passes on data from a human interface device (mouse, game controller) through either OSC or MIDI. When I first created it back in 2004, there were not so many other options. Today, however, users would typically find more features in an application like Osculator or Steim’s Junxion. Still, MultiControl is downloaded hundreds of times per month, which should indicate that some people think it is interesting and useful. ...

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. ...