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.

In my ever-growing collection of FFmpeg-related blog posts, I will today show how to add subtitles to videos. These tricks are based on the need to create a captioned version of a video I made to introduce the Workshop on NIME Archiving for the 2022 edition of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). This is the video I discuss in this blog post: Note that YouTube supports turning on and off the subtitles (CC button).

This week I presented the paper NIME and the Environment: Toward a More Sustainable NIME Practice at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in Shanghai/online with Raul Masu, Adam Pultz Melbye, and John Sullivan. Below is our 3-minute video summary of the paper. And here is the abstract: This paper addresses environmental issues around NIME research and practice. We discuss the formulation of an environmental statement for the conference as well as the initiation of a NIME Eco Wiki containing information on environmental concerns related to the creation of new musical instruments.

We presented the installation Strings On-Line at NIME 2020. It was supposed to be a physical installation at the conference to be held in Birmingham, UK. Due to the corona crisis, the conference went online, and we decided to redesign the proposed physical installation into an online installation instead. The installation ran continuously from 21-25 July last year, and hundreds of people “came by” to interact with it. I finally got around to edit a short (1-minute) video promo of the installation:

Several people have argued that we should change from having a page limit (2/4/6 pages) for NIME paper submissions to a word limit instead. It has also been argued that references should not be counted as part of the text. However, what should the word limits be? It is always good to look at the history, so I decided to check how long previous NIME papers have been. I started by exporting the text from all of the PDF files with the pdftotext command-line utility:

This blog post summarizes my experimentation with improving the quality of the PDF files in the proceedings of the annual International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). Centralized archive We have, over the last few years, worked hard on getting the NIME adequately archived. Previously, the files were scattered on each year’s conference web site. The first step was to create a central archive on nime.org. The list there is automagically generated from a collection of publicly available BibTeX files that serve as the master document of the proceedings archive.

During the NIME conference this year (which as run entirely online due to the coronavirus crisis), I led a workshop called NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop. In this post, I will explain the background of the workshop, how it was run in an asynchronous+synchronous mode, and reflect on the results. If you don’t want to read everything below, here is a short introduction video I made to explain the background (shot at my “summer office” up in the Hardangervidda mountain range in Norway):

This week I led the workshop “Open Research Strategies and Tools in the NIME Community” at NIME 2019 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We had a very good discussion, which I hope can lead to more developments in the community in the years to come. Below is the material that we wrote for the workshop. Workshop organisers Alexander Refsum Jensenius, University of Oslo Andrew McPherson, Queen Mary University of London Anna Xambó, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology Dan Overholt, Aalborg University Copenhagen Guillaume Pellerin, IRCAM Ivica Ico Bukvic, Virginia Tech Rebecca Fiebrink, Goldsmiths, University of London Rodrigo Schramm, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Workshop description The development of more openness in research has been in progress for a fairly long time, and has recently received a lot of more political attention through the Plan S initiative, The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), EU’s Horizon Europe, and so on.

The MCT master’s programme has been running for a year now, and everyone involved has learned a lot. In parallel to the development of the programme, and teaching it, we are also running the research project SALTO. Here the idea is to systematically reflect on our educational practice, which again will feed back into better development of the MCT programme. One outcome of the SALTO project, is a paper that we presented at the NIME conference in Porto Alegre this week:

I am super excited about our new Nordic Sound and Music Computing Network, which has just started up with funding from the Nordic Research Council. This network brings together a group of internationally leading sound and music computing researchers from institutions in five Nordic countries: Aalborg University, Aalto University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of Iceland, and University of Oslo. The network covers the field of sound and music from the “soft” to the “hard,” including the arts and humanities, and the social and natural sciences, as well as engineering, and involves a high level of technological competency.

I am happy to announce that Springer has now released a book that I have been co-editing with Michael J. Lyons: “A NIME Reader: Fifteen Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression”. From the book cover: What is a musical instrument? What are the musical instruments of the future? This anthology presents thirty papers selected from the fifteen year long history of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME).

Michael J. Lyons and myself have been working on an edited collection of papers from the NIME conference over the last year, and we presented some reflections on this work at NIME yesterday. Trends at NIME – Reflections on Editing “A NIME Reader” [PDF]** ** This paper provides an overview of the process of editing the forthcoming anthology “A NIME Reader—Fifteen years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression.” The selection process is presented, and we reflect on some of the trends we have observed in re-discovering the collection of more than 1200 NIME papers published throughout the 15 yearlong history of the conference.

At NIME we have a large archive of the conference proceedings, but we do not (yet) have a proper repository for instrument designs. For that reason I took part in a workshop on Monday with the aim to lay the groundwork for a new repository: NIMEhub: Toward a Repository for Sharing and Archiving Instrument Designs [PDF] This workshop will explore the potential creation of a community database of digital musical instrument (DMI) designs.

This week I am participating at the NIME conference, organised at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am doing some administrative work as chair of the NIME steering committee, and I am also happy to present a paper tomorrow: Title To Gesture or Not? An Analysis of Terminology in NIME Proceedings 2001–2013 Links Paper (PDF) Presentation (HTML) Spreadsheet with summary of data (ODS) OSX shell script used for analysis Abstract The term ‘gesture’ has represented a buzzword in the NIME community since the beginning of its conference series.

From 2007 to 2011 I had a part-time research position at the Norwegian Academy of Music in a project called New Instruments for Musical Exploration, and with the acronym NIME. This project was also the reason why I ended up organising the NIME conference in Oslo in 2011. The NIME project focused on creating an environment for musical innovation at the Norwegian Academy of Music, through exploring the design of new physical and electronic instruments.

Back from a great NIME 2013 conference in Daejeon + Seoul! For Norwegian readers out there, I have written a blog post about the conference on my head of department blog. I would have loved to write some more about the conference in English, but I think these images from my Flickr account will have to do for now: {style=“padding: 0; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; width: 500px;”} At the last of the conference it was also announced that next year’s conference will be held in London and hosted by the Embodied AudioVisual Interaction Group at Goldsmiths.

Yesterday, Ståle presented a paper on mocap filtering at the NIME conference in Daejeon. Today I presented a demo on using Kinect images as input to my sonomotiongram technique. Title Kinectofon: Performing with shapes in planes Links Paper (PDF) Poster (PDF) Software Videos (coming soon) Abstract The paper presents the Kinectofon, an instrument for creating sounds through free-hand interaction in a 3D space. The instrument is based on the RGB and depth image streams retrieved from a Microsoft Kinect sensor device.

We have three papers from our fourMs group at this year’s NIME conference in Daejeon. The first one was presented today by Ståle Skogstad, and is based on his work on trying minimize the delay when filtering motion capture data. Title Filtering motion capture data for real-time applications Links: Paper (PDF) Project page Max/MSP implementation Abstract: In this paper we present some custom designed filters for real-time motion capture applications. Our target application is motion controllers, i.

This week the huge ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (also known as CHI) is organised in Paris. This is the largest conference in the field of human-computer interaction, and is also the conference at which the NIME conference series started. I will participate in a panel session called “Music, Technology, and Human-Computer Interaction” on Wednesday. This is a great opportunity to show musical HCI to the broader HCI community, and I am very much looking forwards to participating.

{.alignright .size-full .wp-image-2180 width=“211” height=“160”} Here is a little plug for the submission deadline for this year’s NIME conference. I usually don’t write so much about deadlines here, but as the current chairof the international steering committee for the conference series, I feel that I should do my share in helping to spread the word. The NIME conference is a great place to meet academics, designers, technologists, and artists, all working on creating weird instruments and music.

{style=“padding: 0; overflow: hidden; margin: 0; width: 500px;”} NIME 2012 was full of interesting presentations, posters, demos, installations, and concerts (including 4 papers from our group). I would have loved to write up a detailed report on everything I saw and heard, but just don’t have the time. Here are at least a selection of my photos, to give an impression of how it was:

Probably by coincidence, but still a nice concurrence: on the last day of this year’s International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Google celebrates Robert Moog’s 78 year birthday. The interesting thing is that Google not only has a picture of a Moog synthesizer, but they also have an interactive model up and running, where it is possible to play on the keyboard and tweak the knobs.

Yesterday I wrote about the 4 papers I was involved in at this year’s NIME conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The one I was the first author on was entitled The music ball project: Concept, design, development, performance, and is mainly a historic write-up of the work I have been doing on developing different types of music balls over the years, including various handheld music balls, the Music Troll, Big Buoy and the ADHD ball.

I was involved in no less than 4 papers at this year’s NIME conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. K. Nymoen, A. Voldsund, S. A. v. D. Skogstad, A. R. Jensenius, and J. Tørresen. **Comparing motion data from an iPod touch to a high-end optical infrared marker-based motion capture system **[PDF] The paper presents an analysis of the quality of motion data from an iPod Touch (4th gen.). Acceleration and orientation data derived from internal sensors of an iPod is compared to data from a high end optical infrared marker-based motion capture system (Qualisys) in terms of latency, jitter, accuracy and precision.

At the last day of this year’s NIME conference in Oslo I was not only elected as a member of the international steering committee (SC) for the NIME conference series, but I was also elected as the new chair for the SC. This is exciting, particularly since I will be the first NIME SC chair ever. Since the start in 2001, the conference has seen a rapid growth, and we now see that it is time to formalise the structure of the organisation a bit.

It has been fairly quiet on this blog as of recently. This is not because I haven’t been doing anything, rather the opposite. We are now at the end of day 2 of the NIME conference, and there is one more day to go. Lots of great presentations, concerts and hundreds of cool NIME people in Oslo these days!

I am chair for the 11th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2011)
, which will be organized 30 May - 1 June 2011 here in Oslo, Norway. The official “call for participation” has just been posted here, and sent to various mailing lists. Please forward this to anyone that you think may be interested in participating.

micro-OSC (uOSC) was made public yesterday at NIME: micro-OSC (uOSC) is a firmware runtime system for embedded platforms designed to remain as small as possible while also supporting evolving trends in sensor interfaces such as regulated 3.3 Volt high-resolution sensors, mixed analog and digital multi-rate sensor interfacing, n > 8-bit data formats. uOSC supports the Open Sound Control protocol directly on the microprocessor, and the completeness of this implementation serves as a functional reference platform for research and development of the OSC protocol.

Jyri Pakarinen just presented a paper on the Virtual Slide Guitar (VSG) here at NIME in Genova. They used a commercial 6DOF head tracking solution from Naturalpoint called TrackIR 4 Pro. The manufacturer promises: Experience real time 3D view control in video games and simulations just by moving your head! The only true 6DOF head tracking system of its kind. TrackIR takes your PC gaming to astonishing new levels of realism and immersion!

Here is the poster I presented at NIME 2006 in Paris based on the paper Towards a Gesture Description Interchange Format. The paper was written together with Tellef Kvifte, and the abstract reads: This paper presents our need for a Gesture Description Interchange Format (GDIF) for storing, retrieving and sharing information about music-related gestures. Ideally, it should be possible to store all sorts of data from various commercial and custom made controllers, motion capture and computer vision systems, as well as results from different types of gesture analysis, in a coherent and consistent way.

New publication on our Cheapstick music controller: {width=“600” height=“315”} Reference: A. R. Jensenius, R. Koehly, and M. M. Wanderley. Building low-cost music controllers. In R. Kronland-Martinet, T. Voinier, and S. Ystad, editors, CMMR 2005, LNCS 3902, pages 123–129. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2006. (PDF from Springer) **Abstract: **This paper presents our work on building low-cost music controllers intended for educational and creative use. The main idea was to build an electronic music controller, including sensors and a sensor interface, on a “10 euro” budget.