Musique de Table is a wonderful piece written by Thierry de Mey. I have seen it performed live several times, and here came across a one-shot video recording that I thought it would be interesting to test with some video visualization tools in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. I started with this source video: From this, I generated a history image and vertical videogram (time running from top to bottom):

Today the MIT Press journal Leonardo has published my paper entitled “Some video abstraction techniques for displaying body movement in analysis and performance”. The paper is a summary of my work on different types of visualisation techniques of music-related body motion. Most of these techniques were developed during my PhD, but have been refined over the course of my post-doc fellowship. The paper is available from the Leonardo web page (or MUSE), and will also be posted in the digital archive at UiO after the 6 month embargo period.

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 research[ coordinator Anne Cathrine Wesnes shot during the presentation. ]{.blogtekst} Here I am telling the students a little about our new research group, and showing the main room:

Challenge Traditional keyframe displays of videos are not particularly useful when studying single-shot studio recordings of music-related movements, since they mainly show static postural information and no motion. Using motion images of various kinds helps in visualizing what is going on in the image. Below can be seen (from left): motion image, with noise reduction, with edge detection, with “trails” and added to the original image. Making Motiongrams We are used to visualizing audio with spectrograms, and have been exploring different techniques for visualizing music-related movements in a similar manner.