Music

Back in 2022, I sat down with my good colleague, Cagri Erdem, to explore two commercially available new interfaces for musical expression: the Seaboard Grand and the ContinuuMini. I have written about my experiences with both of these devices in my book, Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments. In short, they are both super exciting to play with, particularly because unlike many other electronic instruments, they allow for continuous control of pitch and timbre....

I often find that people mix up the terms “music performance” and “musical performance”. Which one is the correct one to use? As far as I can see in various dictionaries, there are no regional differences. Both terms are used widely in both British and American English. It is more of a difference in context. Music performance is more commonly used in contexts specifically focused on the act of performing music, such as concerts, recitals, and instrumental or vocal performances....

I often see that people confuse the two terms “length” and “duration”. In most cases, it doesn’t matter, but there are subtle differences one should be aware of. Here is a quick reference: length = a count (number of items, characters, samples, notes) duration = a time span (how long something lasts) In music research, the difference matters! For example, if you ask about the “length of a piece of music”, it could refer to the number of notes in the score (e....

ChatGPT cannot play sounds, but since it is trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, it also scraped numerous pieces with information about music chords. Here is a little exploration of that possibility. Obtaining chord information For accompanying musicians, it is common to look for chords for tunes. I began by asking for some well-known tunes: Q: What are the music chords for the song Yesterday? A: The chord progression for the song “Yesterday” by The Beatles is as follows: Verse: G Em C D7 G Em C D7 Em B7 Em B7 C Am D7 G Bridge: Bm Em Bm Em C Am D D7 G Em C D7 G And it repeats throughout the song....

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 analyse: The test with some video visualization tools in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. For running the commands below, you first need to import the toolbox in Python: import musicalgestures as mg I started the process by importing the source video:...

I am happy to announce that my book Sound Actions - Conceptualizing Musical Instruments is now published! I am also thrilled that this is an open access book, meaning that is free to download and read. You are, of course, also welcome to pick up a paper copy! Here is a quick video summary of the book’s content: In the book, I combine perspectives from embodied music cognition and interactive music technology....

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....

I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012. Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4CBsDT37I As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still....

I am happy to announce that Cagri Erdem and I have written a chapter titled “Gestures in ensemble performance” in the new book Together in Music: Coordination, Expression, Participation edited by Renee Timmers Freya Bailes, and Helena Daffern. Video Teaser For the book launch, Cagri and I recorded a short video teaser: https://youtu.be/Fd2kIAeorRk Abstract The more formal abstract is: The topic of gesture has received growing attention among music researchers over recent decades....

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....