Piano

We are fortunate to have received funding from UiO’s infrastructure board to purchase a new Yamaha Disklavier grand piano for the Department of Musicology. We have applied for this several times and are grateful to the university for making such an investment. To celebrate the new instrument, we organized the seminar New Horizons in Piano Performance Research during which I did a “lecture-recital” talking a little about the history of piano research in the department and stress-testing the new instrument. ...

Here is my latest electroacoustic composition “The Sound of Naked Piano”: Alexander Jensenius · The Sound of Naked Piano I got the idea to the title of this piece from a concert outside the San Francisco Museum of Modern art: ”The sound of naked Men”. A naked man was lying with contact microphones attached to his body. Lots of amplifiers and speakers provided the audience with crisp sounds of heart beats, and blood pulsating through the veins of the “performer”. Somehow I felt a close similarity when I was standing bent inside the grand piano with my microphone. ...

{.youtube-video} [](http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7141506&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1){.dmtdwtroqzfivctewzyq}[](http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7141506&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1){.dmtdwtroqzfivctewzyq} [](http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7141506&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1){.dmtdwtroqzfivctewzyq}[](http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7141506&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1){.dmtdwtroqzfivctewzyq} Alexander Refsum Jensenius: Etude #2 for piano and live electronics from Alexander Refsum Jensenius on Vimeo. This performance was part of the workshop “Hyperimprovisation” at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Norway, 15-17 September 2009. The inspiration for the piece was to explore simplicity in performance of live electronics together with acoustic instruments. Many performances of live electronics is based on large amounts of electronic equipment, cables, sound cards, large PA-speakers, etc. One problem with this is that the visual appearance of the setup looks chaotic. Another is that the potential for things that can go wrong seems to increase exponentially with the amount of equipment being used. The largest problem, though, at least based on my own experience of performing with live electronics, is that much effort is spent on making sure that everything is working properly at the same time. This leaves less mental capacity to focus on the performance itself, and sonic output. ...

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 shot by Anne Cathrine Wesnes during the presentation. Here I am telling the students a little about our new research group, and showing the main room: ...

Last week I performed my master exam concert at the Department of Music and Theatre, University of Oslo. The program consisted of improvisations for piano and live electronics. Different MIDI, audio, and video processing techniques were used. Here I describe the different pieces. Performa It is incredible how many exciting sounds one can get from a piano, and mallets are a nice change from playing on the keys. The computer helps with temporal adjustments and background sounds. ...