Motion Capture

People often confuse kinetics and kinematics. What are they, and which one can you derive from motion capture data? Kinematics Kinematic analysis concerns the geometric aspects of motion, including position, velocity, and acceleration. When dealing with motion capture, you typically get either position (from a camera-based system) or something similar to acceleration (from accelerometers). These are related, and since I have now figured out how to make equations here on the blog, here you get a summary of high school physics: ...

After two years in the making, I am happy to finally introduce our new online course: Motion Capture: The art of studying human activity. The course will run on the FutureLearn platform and is for everyone interested in the art of studying human movement. It has been developed by a team of RITMO researchers in close collaboration with the pedagogical team and production staff at LINK – Centre for Learning, Innovation & Academic Development. ...

After nearly three years of planning, we can finally welcome people to MusicLab Copenhagen. This is a unique “science concert” involving the Danish String Quartet, one of the world’s leading classical ensembles. Tonight, they will perform pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Schnittke and folk music in a normal concert setting at Musikhuset in Copenhagen. However, the concert is nothing but normal. Live music research During the concert, about twenty researchers from RITMO and partner institutions will conduct investigations and experiments informed by phenomenology, music psychology, complex systems analysis, and music technology. The aim is to answer some big research questions, like: ...

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. ...

A few days after Agata Zelechowska defended her PhD dissertation, we got the news that her last paper was finally published in Music & Science. It is titled Who Moves to Music? Empathic Concern Predicts Spontaneous Movement Responses to Rhythm and Music and was co-authored by Victor Gonzalez Sanchez, Bruno Laeng, Jonna Vuoskoski, and myself. The paper is based on Agata’s headphones-speakers experiment. We have previously published a paper showing that people move more when listening on headphones. This, however, the focus was on the data gathered on individual differences. Many variables were tested, but it was only empathic concern that turned out to be a motion predictor. ...

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. In this blog post, I will reflect on yesterday’s MusicTestLab - Slow TV. ...

After several years of hard work, we are very happy to announce a new publication coming out of the MICRO project that I am leading: Headphones or Speakers? An Exploratory Study of Their Effects on Spontaneous Body Movement to Rhythmic Music (Frontiers Psychology). This is the first journal article of my PhD student Agata Zelechowska, and it reports on a standstill study conducted a couple of years ago. It is slightly different than the paradigm we have used for the Championships of Standstill. While the latter is based on single markers on the head of multiple people, Agata’s experiment was conducted with full-body motion capture of individuals. ...

I am a big supporter of Open Access publishing, but for various reasons some of my publications are not openly available by default. This is the case for the chapter Methods for Studying Music-Related Body Motion that I have contributed to the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology. I am very happy to announce that the embargo on the book ran out today, which means that a pre-print version of my chapter is finally freely available in UiO’s digital repository. This chapter is a summary of my experiences with music-related motion analysis, and I often recommend it to students. Therefore it is great that it is finally available to download from everywhere. ...

I was at NTNU in Trondheim today, teaching a workshop on motion capture methodologies for the students in the Choreomundus master’s programme. This is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD) investigating dance and other movement systems (ritual practices, martial arts, games and physical theatre) as intangible cultural heritage. I am really impressed by this programme! It was a very nice and friendly group of students from all over the world, and they are experiencing a truly unique education run by the 4 partner universities. This is an even more complex organisational structure than the MCT programme that I am involved in myself. ...

Yesterday I presented the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab in the late-breaking demo session at the ISMIR conference in Paris. The Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab (MGT) aims at assisting music researchers with importing, preprocessing, analyzing, and visualizing video, audio, and motion capture data in a coherent manner within Matlab. Most of the concepts in the toolbox are based on the Musical Gestures Toolbox that I first developed for Max more than a decade ago. A lot of the Matlab coding for the new version was done in the master’s thesis by Bo Zhou. ...