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.

I am happy to announce that the Research Council of Norway has awarded funding to establish RITMO Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. The centre is a collaboration between Departments of Musicology, Psychology and Informatics at University of Oslo. Project summary Rhythm is omnipresent in human life, as we walk, talk, dance and play; as we tell stories about our past; and as we predict the future.

My colleague Ragnhild Torvanger Solberg and I presented a paper at the Sound and Music Computing conference in Hamburg last week called: “Optical or Inertial? Evaluation of Two Motion Capture Systems for Studies of Dancing to Electronic Dance Music”. This is a methodological paper, trying to summarize our experiences with using our Qualisys motion capture system for group dance studies. We have two other papers in the pipeline that describes the actual data from the experiments in question.

[As I have mentioned previously, life has been quite hectic over the last year, becoming Head of Department at the same time as getting my second daughter. So my research activities have slowed down considerably, and also the activity on this blog.]{style=“line-height: 1.5;”} When it comes to blogging, I have focused on building up my Head of Department blog (in Norwegian), which I use to comment on things happening in the Department as well as relevant (university) political issues.

Today I start as Head of Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo! One of the things I promised in my application was to set up a Head of Department blog, and I am happy to announce that the first entry was posted this morning. I am thrilled and excited to get the opportunity to lead the institution that I have both studied and worked at for more than a decade.

Many music researchers, myself included, are dependent on technology in and for their work. In fact, I think many of the most interesting research findings in musicology in recent years are based on the new potential from various types of technology, e.g. tools coming from the music information retrieval (MIR) community. I am therefore puzzled when I meet music researchers that are not interested in, or even outspokenly negative, to the possibilities of new technologies for music research.