It has been fairly quiet here on the blog recently. One reason for this is that I am spending quite some time on setting up the new Music, Communication and Technology master’s programme. This is an exciting collaborative project with our colleagues at NTNU. The whole thing is focused around network-based communication, and the students will use, learn about, develop and evaluate technologies for musical communication between the two campuses in Oslo and Trondheim.

We have been running our free online course Music Moves a couple of times on the FutureLearn platform. The course consists of a number of videos, as well as articles, quizzes, etc., all of which help create a great learning experience for the people that take part. One great thing about the FutureLearn model (similar to Coursera, etc.) is that they focus on creating a complete course. There are many benefits to such a model, not least to create a virtual student group that interact in a somewhat similar way to campus students.

On Thursday we are organising the first Norwegian Championship of standstill at University of Oslo. This is part of the University’s Open Day, a day when potential new students can come and see what happens on campus. Besides the competitive part, the championship is (of course) a great way to gather more data about how people stand still. The art of standing still is something that has been a great interest of mine for the last year or so, and I have been carrying out different types of smaller experiments to understand more about the micromovements observed when standing still.