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.

Today I will present the paper Non-Realtime Sonification of Motiongrams at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC) in Stockholm. The paper is based on a new implementation of my sonomotiongram technique, optimised for non-realtime use. I presented a realtime version of the sonomotiongram technique at ACHI 2012 and a Kinect version, the Kinectofon, at NIME earlier this year. The new paper presents the ImageSonifyer application and a collection of videos showing how it works.

Today the MIT Press journal Leonardo has published my paper entitled “Some video abstraction techniques for displaying body movement in analysis and performance”. The paper is a summary of my work on different types of visualisation techniques of music-related body motion. Most of these techniques were developed during my PhD, but have been refined over the course of my post-doc fellowship. The paper is available from the Leonardo web page (or MUSE), and will also be posted in the digital archive at UiO after the 6 month embargo period.

I am happy to announce that a paper I wrote together with Victoria Johnson has just been published in Computer Music Journal. The paper is based on the experiences that Victoria and I gained while working on the piece Transformation for electric violin and live electronics (see video of the piece below). Citation A. R. Jensenius and V. Johnson. Performing the electric violin in a sonic space. Computer Music Journal, 36(4):28–39, 2012.

Today I presented the paper Evaluating how different video features influence the visual quality of resultant motiongrams at the Sound and Music Computing conference in Copenhagen. Abstract Motiongrams are visual representations of human motion, generated from regular video recordings. This paper evaluates how different video features may influence the generated motiongram: inversion, colour, filtering, background, lighting, clothing, video size and compression. It is argued that the proposed motiongram implementation is capable of visualising the main motion features even with quite drastic changes in all of the above mentioned variables.

Challenge Traditional keyframe displays of videos are not particularly useful when studying single-shot studio recordings of music-related movements, since they mainly show static postural information and no motion. Using motion images of various kinds helps in visualizing what is going on in the image. Below can be seen (from left): motion image, with noise reduction, with edge detection, with “trails” and added to the original image. Making Motiongrams We are used to visualizing audio with spectrograms, and have been exploring different techniques for visualizing music-related movements in a similar manner.

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.