As part of my duties as a Norwegian member of EUA’s Open Science Expert Group, I was asked to write an “expert voice” on how to think about FAIR data from an educational perspective. Below is a copy of my short article. How Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data enables research-led education FAIR data is an essential component of the open research ecosystem. In this article, Alexander Refsum Jensenius argues that “FAIRification” can also benefit research-based and research-led education, providing opportunities to bring together different university missions.

There has been much discussion about ChatGPT recently, a chat robot that can write meaningful answers to questions. I haven’t had time to test it out properly, and it was unavailable when I wanted to check it today. Instead, I have played around with YouWrite, a service that can write text based on limited input. I thought it would be interesting to ask it to write about something I know well, so I asked it to write a text based on an abbreviated version of the abstract of my new book:

Today, I am starting up my new research project AMBIENT: Bodily Entrainment to Audiovisual Rhythms. I have recruited a great team and today we will have our first meeting to discuss how to work together in the coming years. I will surely write much about this project on the blog. For now, here is a quick teaser to explain what it is all about:

I am super excited about starting up my new project - MICRO - Human Bodily Micromotion in Music Perception and Interaction - these days. Here is a short trailer explaining the main points of the project: Now I have also been able to recruit two great researchers to join me, postdoctoral researcher Victor Evaristo Gonzalez Sanchez and PhD fellow Agata Zelechowska. Together we will work on human micromotion, how music influences such micromotion, and how we can get towards microinteraction in digital musical instruments.

After four years as Head of Department (of Musicology at UiO), I am going back to my regular associate professor position in January. It has been a both challenging and rewarding period as HoD, during which I have learned a lot about managing people, managing budgets, understanding huge organizations, developing strategies, talking to all sorts of people at all levels in the system, and much more. I am happy to hand over a Department in growth to the new HoD (Peter Edwards).

A couple of weeks ago, NRK, the Norwegian broadcasting company screened a documentary about my research together with the physiotherapists at NTNU in the CIMA project. The short story is that we have developed the tools I first made for the Musical Gestures Toolbox during my PhD, into a system with the ambition of detecting signs of cerebral palsy in infants. The documentary was made for the science program Schrödingers Katt, and I am very happy that they spent so much time on developing the story, filming and editing.

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.

I have been using Google Scholar as one of my main sources for finding academic papers and books, and find that is has improved considerably over the last few years. A while ago they also opened for creating your own academic profile. It is fairly basic, but they have done a great job in managing to find most of my papers, citations, etc. Now also Microsoft has jumped on academic search, and has launched their own service.

I am happy to see that the first point in the new UiO strategy plan is interdisciplinarity, or more specifically: “Et grensesprengende universitet”. Interdisciplinarity is always easier in theory than in practice, and this is something I am debating in a feature article in the latest volume (pages 32-33) of Forskerforum, the journal of the The Norwegian Association of Researchers (Forskerforbundet). I have written about interdisciplinarity on this blog several times before (here, here and here).

Kristian Nymoen have updated the Jamoma modules for recording and playing back GDIF data in Max 5. The modules are based on the FTM library (beta 12, 13-15 does not work), and can be downloaded here. We have also made available three use cases in the (soon to be expanded) fourMs database: simple mouse recording, sound saber and a short piano example. See the video below for a quick demonstration of how it works:

Inspired by the work [[[Static no. 12 by Daniel Crooks that I watched at the Sydney Biennale]{.entry-content}]{.status-content}]{.status-body} a couple of weeks ago, I have added the option of scanning a single column in the jmod.motiongram% module in Jamoma. Here is a video that shows how this works in practice: About motiongrams A motiongram is a way of displaying motion (e.g. human motion) in the time-domain, somehow similar to how we are used to working with time-representations of audio (e.

In video analysis I have been working with what is often referred to as “quantity of motion” (which should not be confused with momentum, the product of mass and velocity p=mv), i.e. the sum of all active pixels in a motion image. In this sense, QoM is 0 if there is no motion, and has a positive value if there is motion in any direction. Working with various types of sensor and motion capture systems, I see the same need to know how much motion there is in the system, independent of the number of variables and dimensions in the system studied.

The new University of Oslo contract with Springer means that staff and students get access to all Springer books (~15 000) published since 2005 (titles available here). Now I just need to get an iPad to start reading…

A quick observation this morning as I was brushing up on a couple of grammatical things over at Grammar Girl while finishing a book chapter: Concerning the abbreviations i.e. (that is) and e.g. (for example), most American English dictionaries seem to suggest that they should be followed by a comma, while in British English it is fine to leave the commas out. That said, abbreviations generally makes a text less approachable, so you might want to spell out the words in plain text.

I was at the Musical Body conference at University of London last week and presented my work on visualisation of music-related movements. For my PhD I developed the Musical Gestures Toolbox as a collection of components and modules for Max/MSP/Jitter, and most of this has been merged into Jamoma. However, lots of potential users are not familiar with Max, so over the last couple of years I have decided to develop standalone applications for some of the main tasks.

A couple of weeks ago I came across the English word confluence. The Oxford dictionary informs me that this means “the junction of two rivers, esp. rivers of approximately equal width”. That sounds very poetic, and it gets even better when you combine it with humans and computers, as they have done in the call for FP7 FET projects: The initiative aims to investigate and demonstrate new possibilities emerging at the confluence between the human and technological realms.

We have set up a new wiki for the fourMs lab. It is mainly intended as a place for tutorials and various tricks and tips in using the software and hardware systems available. Hopefully, the wiki can also be useful for other researchers in the field.

The last few weeks have been quite busy here in Oslo. We opened the new lab just about a month ago, and since then I have organised several workshops, guest lectures and concerts both at UiO and at NMH. I was planning to post some longer descriptions of what has been going on, but decided to go for a summary instead. {height=“150”} First we had a workshop called embedded systems workshop, but which I retroactively have renamed RaPMIC workshop (Rapid Prototyping of Music Instruments and Controllers).

We are having a Jamoma workshop at the fourMs lab this week. Most of the time is being spent on making Jamoma 0.5 stable, but we are also discussing some other issues. Throughout these discussions, particularly about how to handle multichannel audio in Max, I have realised that we should also start thinking about data signals as a type in itself. Jamoma is currently, as is Max, split into three different “types” of modules and processing: control, audio and video.

While in Gent a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit the Logos Foundation and hear a concert with the robot orchestra. It was very interesting to hear Godfried-Willem Raes talk about his instruments and his music making, which has been going on for almost 40 years.

A journalist from the national broadcaster NRK came to our opening on Friday, and he made a story which was shown on the “cultural news” Friday night. The clip can be seen here (in Norwegian). Below is an image of Rolf Inge Godøy being interviewed before the opening.

As I have blogged about over on our project page, we are going to have an official opening of the new lab next Friday. Please come over if you are in the neighbourhood.

I had a spam attack in the comments fields of the blog a few weeks ago, leaving me close to 30 000 comments that I have to manually moderate. So I have decided to turn off the comment feature for now. Too bad, since I think the ability to comment on other people’s blog entries is an important part in the democratisation of the web.

One of the groups at the ISSSM showed a video of metronome synchronisation shot at the Nonlinear dynamics and medical physics group at Lancaster University. This is an old physics trick, first described by Huygens, but it is still fascinating. Here I found the video on Youtube:

AppleInsider reports on a set of patents for multimodal sensing (i.e. using two or more senses at the same time). Multimodal sensing has been a hot research topic in human-computer interaction for several years, based on the knowledge that human perception and cognition is fundamentally multimodal. If we want computers to respond more efficiently to human communication they will also have to use more than one modality in their sensing and communication.

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 we started setting up a “black box” in the new lab space. It is great to finally have a more permanent motion lab set up that we can use for various types of observation studies and recording sessions.

I have written about the (hidden) possibility of exporting references from Google Scholar before, but since several people have asked about this lately, I will post a more detailed description of how you can do that here. It is very simple: 1. Go to Google Scholar 2. Select the Scholar preferences: 3. At the bottom of the preferences page you find a menu where you can choose which reference format you prefer (BibTex, Endnote, Reference Manager, etc.

Last week I presented the paper Some Challenges Related to Music and Movement in Mobile Music Technology at the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. A PDF of the paper is available here. Not sure if the abstract justifies the fairly dense paper, but at least it is compact. Mobile music technology opens many new opportunities in terms of location-aware systems, social interaction etc., but we should not forget that many challenges faced in ”immobile” music technology research are also apparent in mobile computing.

Another post from the Mobile Music Workshop in Vienna. Yesterday I saw a demo on the Audioscape project by Mike Wozniewski (McGill). He was using the Gumstix, a really small system running a Linux version called OpenEmbedded. He was running PDa (a Pure Data clone) and was able to process sensor data and run audio off of the small device.

Some pictures from the kickoff-seminar for the Sensing Music-related Actions project last week: Project leader Rolf-Inge Godøy started with a short presentation of the new project. Then Marcelo M. Wanderley (McGill, Montreal) held an overview of various types of motion capture solutions, and the pros and cons of each of them. He stressed two main challenges he had had over the years: synchronisation of various types of mo-cap data with audio, video, music notation, etc.

It has now been confirmed that the Sensing Music-related Actions project will move into new spaces in a building called Veglaboratoriet. The building, which used to house various types of chemical laboratories, is located next to the computer science building. The downside is that we will be farther away from the music department (10 minutes to walk…), but we will be one floor up from the robot lab of the ROBIN group, the partner in our new project.

Came across a student project from Cornell on doing motion capture using accelerometers, based on the Atmel controller. It is a nice overview of many of the challenges faced when working with accelerometers, and the implementation seems to work well. {width=“300/”}

A couple of weeks ago we had an excursion to an anechoic chamber in the basement of the physics department at the University of Oslo. This room is a remainder from back when there was an acoustics group in Oslo (which later moved to Trondheim), and it was a pure coincidence that we discovered that the old room is still intact, largely thanks to Arnt Inge Vistnes. He also happens to be the person that first introduced me to the Fourier transform back in the days when I studied physics, so he got the challenge of holding a guest lecture for our students in sound theory on the topic of (…) the Fourier transform.

The web page for our new research project called Sensing Music-related Actions is now up and running. This is a joint research project of the departments of Musicology and Informatics, and has received external funding through the VERDIKT program of the The Research Council of Norway. The project runs from July 2008 until July 2011. The focus of the project will be on basic issues of sensing and analysing music-related actions, and creating various prototypes for testing the control possibilities of such actions in enactive devices.

The location of the EyesWeb Week is the facilities of the DIST group in the beautiful Casa Paganina, including a large auditorium next to the laboratories. This allows for an ecological setting for experiments, since performers can actually perform on a real stage with real audience. I wish we could have something like this in Oslo! Here a picture from an experimental setup where we are looking at the synchronisation between the musicians in a string trio.

The Chronicle reports that Harvard University enforces an Open Access policy for all publications made by the faculty. This is great, and a drastic step towards making research more publicly available. We have an Open Access system at UiO (called DUO), but so far this is mainly used to publish master theses. I have tried to push for the option to upload other types of publications there too, and this is supposed to be possible now from the FRIDA system which we use to document all research activities.

We had a programming session this morning, and Paolo Coletta implemented a block for creating motiongrams in EyesWeb. It will be available in the new EyesWeb XMI release which will happen in the end of this week. Great!

I am participating in the EyesWeb Week in Genoa this week. This morning Nicola Bernardini held a lecture about Free Software. I have heard him talk on this topic several times before, but as I have now some more experience on participating in a Free Software project (i.e. Jamoma), I got more out of his ideas. Some main points from the talk: Use Free Software! Freeware and shareware may have nothing to do with Free Software.

There has been quite a lot of media interest concerning my PhD disputation last week. A Norwegian news search engine reports some 80 appearances, and this is not counting all the radio interviews I have done… Here are some examples: TV: NRK - Store Studio NRK - Østlandssendingen TV Budstikka Nettavisen ScanpixNTB TV Newspapers: Forskning.no Dagens Næringsliv NRK.no Vårt land + 40 something versions of the story that NTB wrote (national news agency) “Dr.

The newly refurbished OSC forum web site has sparked off some discussions on the OSC_dev mailing list. One interesting note was a reply from Andy W. Schmeder on how OSC should be spelled out correctly: The short answer is, use “Open Sound Control”. The other form one may encounter is “OpenSound Control”, but we don’t use that anymore. Any additional forms you may encounter are probably unintentional. I have been using various versions over the years (also including OpenSoundControl), I guess this is then an official answer since Andy is working at CNMAT.

The paper versions of my dissertation arrived late Friday, and I spent the following days burning 100 CD-ROMs to accompany them… The books were announced available yesterday morning, and all were gone around lunch time. If someone did not get their hands on the paper version, here is (finally) the link to the electronic version (8.1 MB). This is a file optimised for screen usage, so it is in RGB colours, and with internal and external hyperlinks.

My dissertation came from the printing company yesterday. Here’s a picture of some of them: It feels a bit weird to see the final book lying there, being the result of a year of planning and three years of hard work. I wrote most of it last spring, submitting the manuscript in July. Now, about half a year later, I have a much more distant relationship to the whole thing. Seeing the final result is comforting, but it is also sad to let go.

Time has come for preparing my dissertation for official printing. Luckily, I had done most of the formatting when creating the manuscript for the committee, so I expected an easy process. It hasn’t been too bad, but some challenges have appeared: CMYK: There are several years since I last had to deal with professional printing, so I had totally forgotten about the need for preparing all colour images in CMYK. Similarly, the people at the printing office asked me to convert all images that are supposed to appear in b/w to grayscale.

I am updating the GDIF messaging in the jmod.mouse module in Jamoma. Trond suggested to use the OpenGL convention for ranges and coordinate systems, which should give something like this: {width=“414” height=“270”} This means that values on the vertical axis would fall between [-1 1], while values on the horizontal axis would be dependent on the size of the screen. For my screen (1280x800) this gives a range of [-1.6 1.

I am happy to announce that my dissertation entitled “ACTION — SOUND: Developing Methods and Tools to Study Music-Related Body Movement” has been accepted for public disputation for the degree Philosopiae Doctor (Ph.D.) at the University of Oslo: Trial lecture: Wednesday 30 January, 16:15-17:00, Salen, ZEB Disputation: Thursday 31 January, 10:15, Gamle festsal, Sentrum The dissertation will be available to download from this website in a couple of weeks, and a couple of weeks before the disputation you may also get hold of one of the printed copies (for free) from the administration office of the department.

Bug Labs has announced a new open source, Lego-like computer modules running Linux. The idea is to create hardware that can easily be assembled in various ways. Looks neat! {#p503 .imagelink}

Richard Parncutt is asking for response from ex-music psychology students for the Careers After Music Psychology survey. If you have studied music psychology at any time (even if just one course), we would be grateful for about 20 minutes of your valuable time. Please participate regardless of whether or not your current occupation involves music or psychology in any way. This questionnaire aims to document the careers of ex-students of music psychology to inform current students of music psychology about career opportunities to develop career-oriented strategies for teaching music psychology to promote music psychology among potential employers I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of this research, and I hope (and expect) that they find people to end up in a wide range of disciplines.

I heard about the initiative last year at Music & Gesture 2 in Manchester, and now I see that the new online journal Music Performance Research is actually up and running. Music Performance Research is an international peer-reviewed journal that disseminates theoretical and empirical research on the performance of music. Its purpose is to disseminate research on the nature of music performance from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The journal publishes contributions from all disciplines that are relevant to music performance, including archaeology, cultural studies, composition, computer science, education, ethnomusicology, history, medicine, music theory and analysis, musicology, philosophy, physics, psychology, neuroscience and sociology.

Radical Musicology is a peer-reviewed online journal produced in the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University (UK). It was established to provide a forum for progressive thinking across the whole field of musical studies, and encourages work that draws on any and all relevant disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Sounds good, but will it actually manage to keep up to this goal? After browsing through the articles in the first volume, it does not appear particularly “radical”, but rather following along the tradition of new musicology.

Earlier today I went to the release seminar of a new book on creativity and idea development called Slagkraft - Håndbok i idéutvikling by Erik Lerdahl. In his introduction, Erik Lerdahl stressed the importance of creativity not being something that happens by random, but rather that it is a “muscle” that can be trained. Nice metaphor. What I found most interesting during the seminar was the talk by Ragnar Johansen, the marketing director from Stabburet, a Norwegian food producer.

The new Doepfer USB64 Info looks very interesting with its 64 analog (or digital) inputs and €125 price tag. I am not so excited about the MIDI plug, and wonder whether they intend to communicate some higher resolution data through the USB plug. {width=“602” height=“162”}

I have been preparing for Forskningstorget, an annual science fair in the city centre of Oslo, the last couple of days. Last year we made a Music Troll, and this year we are making a giant music ball for people to play with. The ball is built from a huge boat buoy, 120 cm in diameter, made for tank boats and stormy weather. This makes it just perfect for a music installation which is supposed to survive some thousand children over the next couple of days…

I have been sitting through a number of presentations the last days (and many more will follow…), and came to think about some keypoints from the Cognitive Load Theory: Working memory is only limited when you’re learning new information. Once information is in long-term memory, it can be brought back to working memory in very large amounts. In a classroom situation, only limited material is going to be retained, unless notes are taken or handed out.

On Friday I appeared in an interview in Aftenposten, one of the larger newspapers in Norway. The interview describes a recently started collaboration between the Musical Gestures group and Terje Sagvolden’s group working on ADHD. More precisely, they are interested in using my Musical Gestures Toolbox and motiongrams for studying the movements of rats and children with ADHD.

I am slowly adjusting to normal life after finishing my dissertation in July. Needless to say, completing a dissertation is a long physical and psychological experience. In the coming weeks I will write up some of the thoughts I have had during the final lap of the project. Looking at my blog activity over the course of the project, it is interesting to note that it can also serve as a “measure” for my research activity.

Musikkteknologidagene 2007, a Norwegian contact meeting for people working in the field(s) of music technology, will be organised at the Norwegian Academy of Music 10 and 11 October. I initiated the first of these meetings back in 2005, and am happy that we manage to keep the concept alive. Both research on, and use of, music technology is growing rapidly in Norway as everywhere else. However, while many of us working in the field have large international networks in our special branches of the music technology world, we often seem to know little about what is happening in our own country.

There is a new music journal out titled Journal of interdisciplinary music studies, and which seems to be freely available online. I was particularly pleased to read Richard Parncutt’s opening paper on the history and future of systematic musicology. While it has been overshadowed (and to some extent suppressed) by historical musicology for the last decade, there seems to be a growing interest for systematic musicology today. However, as Parncutt argues, much of this research is carried out under other names and in other departments, e.

I recently became aware of Skim, a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X made by the team behind BibDesk. Skim is designed to help reading and annotating scientific papers in PDF, or what they say: “Stop printing and start skimming”. While v0.2 of Skim didn’t contain much more functionality than what’s already available in Preview, v0.3 starts to become interesting. Particularly the possibilities to save and print the notes taken separately.

Students in musicology, music cognition and technology should consider ISSSM 2007: Following on the success of the first international summer school in systematic musicology (ISSSM 2006), the summer school will be held for the second time at IPEM, the research centre of the Department of Musicology of Ghent University (Belgium). This year courses will focus on current topics in the research field such as embodied music cognition, music information retrieval and music and interactive media.

Strange that I didn’t see this before. Apparently, W3C has made a draft for multimodal annotation called EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. The abstract of the document reads: The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input.

I just realised that it is possible to export BibTex entries directly from Google Scholar. This, and other bibliography entry formats, can be set at the bottom of the Scholar Preferences panel. I can’t tell how much easier this makes my life

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. […] Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 ? k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources.

I need to be better at using the delete-button. Computers have made it so easy to write and save lots of text, probably too easy. Since there are no limits, I tend to just shuffle things around the documents (I have one document per chapter) making up my dissertation draft. Throughout the last years, I have been collecting all these small snippets of comments, thoughts and quotes, and I have started to think that now is the time to start using that delete-button rather than just keep moving things around.

jill/txt is discussing whether the novelty of blogs is wearing off: For the second semester running, I have not succeeded in getting my students enthused about blogging. […] And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out. I think the comment by Linn is right on the target:

DevonThink Pro has a concordance function that counts all the words in my research database, currently containing a little more than one thousand documents. This might seem like a trivial function, but it really is an interesting read. First there is a bunch of standard words: Frequency Word --- --- 243220 the 111156 and 41456 for 38622 that 34588 The 25630 with 25591 are 18692 this 17210 from 15045 can .

Craig Sapp (formerly at CCARH now at CHARM) writes: I have been analyzing the performances of Chopin Mazurkas and have been noticing an unusual occurence: the performances of the same two pianists always matched whenever I do an analysis for a particular mazurka. In fact, they matched as well as two different re-releases of the same original recording. The full story about how the tracks have been slightly time-stretched, panned and EQed before being rereleased is covered in a recent story in Gramophone.

We had a meeting about GDIF at McGill yesterday, and I realised that people had very different thoughts about what it is and what it can be used for. While GDIF is certainly intended for formalising the way we code movement and gesture information for realtime usage in NIME using OSC, it is also supposed to be used for offline analysis. I think the best way of doing this, is to have a three level approach as sketched here:

Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit.

I am spending quite a bit of time on reading and writing blogs, e-mail lists and forums every day. After talking to a person that thought this would be just a waste of time, I have been thinking about why this could be justified from a research perspective. While in many cases it could be considered waste of time, in other cases it is really crucial for my research. Working in a fast moving field, where quite a bit of the activities happen online and very little is available through traditional research channels (e.

I spent my flight to Montreal (which became much longer than I expected when I was rescheduled through Chicago) reading Trond Lossius’ report for the Fellowship in the arts program. He addresses a number of interesting topics: Commenting on the necessity for carrying out research for instead of on art, he discusses the concept of “art as code”: It is not only a question of developing tools. [..] Programming code becomes a meta-medium, and creating the program is creating the art work.

After reading Ola’s blog entry about content management, I decided to give MindManager a try. Except for the price tag (luckily they have educational discounts), I like it a lot. It is the first mindmapping software I find useful, and I particularly like the possibility to make notes on any entry. This makes it possible to really use it for mind mapping, and not only as a visualisation tool. Previously, I have tested NovaMind, which creates some fancy-looking mindmaps, but the GUI is much too clumsy for me, and it seems focused on creating printable mindmaps.

A comment on why university teachers should think critically about Word and .doc: Many of us teach cultural analysis and critical thinking in our writing classes. Our first year readers are full of cultural commentary, and we use these texts to teach our students to question the status quo and understand more deeply the implications of the choices they make in this consumer culture. Do writing teachers do the same when they tell students to submit their documents as .

It is always difficult to categorise things, since it is always possible to think of other ways of doing it. But here I have tried to include some of the various fields that my work touch upon in my two-axes sketch: The idea is to include this in the introduction of my dissertation.

Georgia Tech has been hiring a young and interesting music tech faculty over the last years, and now they start a Master of Science program in music tech with a focus on the design and development of novel enabling music technologies. This is yet another truly interdisciplinary music tech program to appear over the last couple of years, and accepting students from a number of different backgrounds, including music, computing and engineering.

I am working on the introduction to my dissertation, and am trying to place my work in a context. Officially, I’m in a musicology program (Norwegian musicology ≈ science of music) in the Faculty of Humanities, but most of my interests are probably closer to psychology and computer science. Quite a lot of what I have been doing has also been used creatively (concerts and installations) although that is not really the focus of my current research.

PhD degrees are new in Norway. Until a couple of years ago, each faculty used to have their own degrees: dr.art., dr.ing. etc. Now, as Norwegian universities are awarding degrees entitled philosophie doctores, I have been used to reading and writing PhD as PhD. However, I just got to know that the official Norwegian abbreviation is ph.d. with dots, no spaces and uncapitalized letters.

As a member of the university’s research committee, I have been reading the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (more popularly know as the Vancouver guidelines) as a basis for creating new and general guidelines for the university. I particularly find the section about authorship credit interesting. Authors of a paper should meet the following three criteria: Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data.

Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results In January 2006 the European Commission published the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The Study resulted from a detailed analysis of the current scholarly journal publication market, together with extensive consultation with all the major stakeholders within the scholarly communication process (researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, research policymakers, etc.). The Study noted that ‘dissemination and access to research results is a pillar in the development of the European Research Area’ and it made a number of balanced and reasonable recommendations to improve the visibility and usefulness of European research outputs.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am thrilled by the fact that various sensing technologies are getting so cheap that they are incorporated everywhere. As could be seen from the presentation of Apple’s new iPhone, it includes an accelerometer to sense tilt of the device (and also movement if they decide to use that for anything), a proximity sensor (ultrasound?) to turn off the display when the phone is put to the ear and a light sensor to change the brightness of the screen (?

Derek Kverno and Jim Nolen have studied the vibration of circular, square and rectangular plates with unbound edges, and have posted som very nice images of radiation patterns of vibrating plates.

What I find most fascinating about Apple’s new iPhone, is the shift from buttons to body. Getting away from the paradigm of pressing buttons to make a call or to navigate, the iPhone boasts a large multi-touch screen where the user will be able to interact by pointing at pictures and objects. Furthermore, the built-in rotation sensor will sense the direction of the device and rotate the screen accordingly, somehow similar to how new digital cameras rotate the pictures you take automatically.

I had a discussion about which software tools I use for my research, so here is a list of the most important (in no particular order): Firefox: with adblock and mouse gestures. NetNewsWire: for handling all the blogs I am reading. MarsEdit: to write blog entries. Publishes directly to my WordPress driven blog. OmniGraffle: for making diagrams. I even made my last conference poster with this program, works great also with photos.

John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity: REDUCE – The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction ORGANIZE – Organization makes a system of many appear fewer TIME – Savings in time feel like simplicity LEARN – Knowledge makes everything simpler DIFFERENCES – Simplicity and complexity need each other CONTEXT – What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral EMOTION – More emotions are better than less TRUST – In simplicity we trust FAILURE – Some things can never be made simple THE ONE – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful

How to distribute things through Amazon. Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89. Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC. Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year. Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside. Ship two copies to Amazon Send cover scan Track sales Register it (optional)

I came across Dave Parry’s blog academhack, with some interesting comments on Mac software in an academic context. I was particularly happy about his 5 Ways to use Quicksilver, which helped me get started using the web and dictionary search in Quicksilver.

An interesting quote from Robert Hatten’s 2004 book on musical gestures: Musical gesture is biologically and culturally grounded in communicative human movement. Gesture draws upon the close interaction (and intermodality) of a range of human perceptual and motor systems to synthesize the energetic shaping of motion through time into significant events with unique expressive force. The biological and cultural motivations of musical gesture are further negotiated within the conventions of a musical style, whose elements include both the discrete (pitch, rhythm, meter) and the analog (dynamics, articulation, temporal pacing).

Joel Spolsky writes about flow: We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow”, also known as being “in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration…trouble is that it’s so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers – especially interruptions by coworkers – all knock you out of the zone.

I have been thinking about what I wrote about improvisation a couple of weeks ago. While preparing for a presentation last week, I was thinking about how linear my presentation software (Apple’s Keynote) is. It is as bad as PowerPoint when it comes to locking you into a linear presentation style. This is fine if you have a clear idea of what you would like to say and which order you want to say things in, but I often find that I have several sections that could be organized differently dependent on the audience, the time constraints etc.

I am working on the theory chapter of my dissertation, and am trying to pin down some terminology. For a long time I have been using the concept of gesture-sound relationships to denote the intimate links between a physical movement and the resultant sound. However, since I am throwing away gesture for now, I also need to reconsider the rest of my vocabulary. Hodgins (2004) uses the term music-movement structural correspondences, which I find problematic since it places music first.

I have been struggling with the word gesture for a while. I, and many others in the music cognition/technology community, have been using it to denote music-related actions (i.e. physical body movement). Not only is the term confusing in the musicology community (e.g. the way Hatten writes about inner-musical qualities), but it is also a misleading term in behavioral and linguistics communities, where gesture usually denotes communicative hand movement or facial expressions.

Usually, we use the word listener when describing the perceiver in a musical context. This, however, does not fit well with the premise of my research which is that music cognition is multimodal in nature. I am reluctant to use the word listener, since it favours listening over the other modalities. The composite spectator-listener (as used by Fells in this paper) includes both the auditory and visual modalities, and is much better than only listener but still lacks the other modalities.

Yesterday, someone commented that improvisation is all about being able to play some random stuff, in realtime. My experience is really the opposite. Learning to improvise on a musical instrument is really all about learning scales, phrases, motifs, and getting experienced in putting them together in a structured way. In realtime. The same is true for improvised presentations and speeches. After holding a number of presentations on my research lately, I have been thinking about how similar the preparation process for a presentation is to a music performance.

I have started testing CiteULike for creating an online bibliography, and came across this blog post on using CiteULike and BibDesk. I would really love to be able to synchronize BibDesk with CiteULike but that doesn’t seem like an option thus far.

Adrian Miles writes about why blogging is interesting for documentary film makers, and summarizes the discussion into the following key points: to document, discuss, reflect and engage with your own practice to promote and build awareness around your current project to spread promotion and recognition across the life of the entire project, and not just post-release so you have a network identity (when someone Googles you, or your project, they find what you say about things first) to present work in progress (brief rough cuts, for example) to present parts or all of your footage that ends up on the floor to solicit, by invitation or discovery, new material (people find you - see 4) relevant to your project to develop your own network skills so that the leap from old to new is lessened transparency about your process, which complements the implicit ethics of documentary as a practice to provide another way of contributing to your community (of documentary filmmakers, and the subject or subjects of your documentary work) I think these are equally interesting for all sorts of other projects, including my own research.

This video shows WiiMote used as a mouse on windows.

Benoît Bardy held a very interesting guest lecture on the topic “Perception-Action Dynamics Underlying Gesture Classification” yesterday. An interesting opening remark was on terminology. He commented that in his field (kinesiology) they never use the term gesture at all, while in the ConGAS community noone seems to talk about movement. He suggested the following definitions for some key terms: Gesture: non-verbal communication, body language, sign, expressive movements Movement: change in position/orientation Action: goal-directed movement Skill: capacity to reach a goal with efficient performance I have tried to understand if there is a difference between movement and motion, but he couldn’t enlighten me there.

Adrian Miles coins the term “profcasting” about academic podcasting: One of the reasons podcasting has had such an easy adoption within universities is that the form fits so comfortably within existing teaching models. […] The problems with it, […] It is asymmetric (I talk to you, you listen), it constructs the learner as passive, and it struggles to provide room for clarification and commentary (dialogue). On the other hand it can be very effective for those students who cannot attend the lecture […]

I am very visually oriented and often prefer some graphic representation over text. Now, as I am starting to get into the writing face of my dissertation, I am looking for how to better incorporate visuals (and other media) as part of my dissertation. I will probably end up with some more or less traditionally formatted document, although I have been thinking about writing a hypertext document. However, I will probably make it as an electronic document (PDF) with included audio and video, and of course plenty of graphics and images.

InDesign used to be my program of choice for design issues, but since it is super-slow on my MacIntel I have been looking for another solution. OmniGraffle Pro has been my main tool for creating small vector graphics for a while, and I gave it a chance to make a full poster. I am very happy with the work flow and the end result looks great. It handles pictures effortlessly (although I miss some simple photo tweaking utilities and cropping) and the graphics look very crisp even in a large format.

In an interview, Trond Lossius discusses his take on sound art. He mentions how he treats video as an advanced spotlight, giving the eyes something to look at while listening to the sound: Video kommer jeg mest til å bruke som avanserte lyskilder. Tanken er at de skal invitere publikum til å bevege seg rundt i rommet, og dermed også utforske hvordan lyden varierer i rommet. Bevegelsene, teksturene og fargene i videoene kan gi øyet noe å hvile på og samtidig invitere til koblinger til hvilke kvaliteter lyden har.

Phidgets just released a new library and drivers for Intel Macs. This was the last thing I really have been missing after I got my new MacBook this summer.

A group of German students are working on a project called Stekgreif where they include a number of popular sensors built as lego-blocks. Adding power through the lego bricks makes it possible to build instruments and other fun things entirely out of lego.

{#image292}Nick Rothwell reviews the Gypsy MIDI controller in Sound on Sound. An excerpt from his conclusion: I know some artists who could build great live performances around a Gypsy MIDI suit, and others who would merely look like plonkers. As to the first question, here at Cassiel Central we’ve been through all manner of MIDI controllers and sensing systems, from fader boxes (motorised and not) through accelerometers, ultrasound systems, camera tracking, joysticks, game controllers and Buchla devices, and some common issues emerge.

Last weekend we participated (again) with a stand at a big science fair down in the city centre of Oslo during the Norwegian Research Days. {.imagelink} The most interesting thing, and also what I have spent the most time on lately was a “music troll” I have been making together with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Arve Voldsund. The troll is basically a box with four speakers on the sides, and four arms sticking out with heads with included sensors.

Nokia 5500 is a new sport phone with a built in pedometer and the ability to use gestures (well, only tapping so far) for controlling music playback. As accelerometers get cheaper I expect to see lots of new gesture-controlled devices.

Steven Berlin Johnson has an interesting blog entry on his use of DevonThink Pro: Over the past few years of working with this approach, I’ve learned a few key principles. The system works for three reasons: 1) The DevonThink software does a great job at making semantic connections between documents based on word frequency. 2) I have pre-filtered the results by selecting quotes that interest me, and by archiving my own prose.

Well, the Dissertation Calculator suggests how my PhD research could have been laid out.

I overheard a conversation the other day where a person commented that university researchers have such a relaxed life, only sitting in their offices reading and writing books all the time. This claim involves (at least) two parts: 1) quiet/relaxed and 2) reading/writing. My own experience as a university research fellow tells a very different story: Quiet/relaxed: Except for a couple of conferences, this summer was, indeed, quiet. That was mainly because I chose to work when everyone else was on vacation… But looking back at the last week, which happened to be the semester opening week (universities and schools start early here in Norway), I don’t think I ever had more than a couple of minutes of “quiet time” in between the rush of e-mails, telephones, meetings, lectures, concerts, etc.

{#image248}Researchers at Microsoft Live Labs are working on Photosynth based on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington. By structuring the photos based on their relative position to each other, it is possible to navigate in a large photo collection in a 3D style way. The system looks very responsive from the video, but I would be curious to see how it works in a real-world context. It would be very interesting to create similar navigation tools for audio.

{.imagelink}Eduardo Miranda and Marcelo M. Wanderley have just released a new book called New Digital Musical Instruments: Control and Interaction Beyond the Keyboard. The chapters are: - Musical Gestures: Acquisition and Mapping Gestural Controllers Sensors and Sensor-to-Computer Interfaces Biosignal Interfaces Toward Intelligent Musical Instruments So far most publications in this field have been in conference proceedings, so it is great to have a book that can be used in teaching.

For some experiments we are conducting on piano playing I have been looking for a way of measuring muscle activity, or electromyography as it is more properly called: Electromyography (EMG) is a medical technique for evaluating and recording physiologic properties of muscles at rest and while contracting. EMG is performed using a instrument called an electromyograph, to produce a record called an electromyogram. An electromyograph detects the electrical potential generated by muscle cells when these cells contract, and also when the cells are at rest.

Adrian Miles has an interesting reflection on the lack of a “place” to work in traditional humanities: Well, one way to approach this is to recognise that in trad. humanities (which I’d defie as having a written based and print literate methodology and practice) place is rendered secondary to idea. We write, and what is written is always regarded as more important than the act of writing (the first separation of theory and practice in trad.

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.

Peter Robinson (University of Cambridge) are working on emotionally intelligent interfaces, and have made a setup for a summer show at a science museum in London where they can track 20 different types of emotional responses using computer vision: Can you read minds? The answer is most likely ‘yes’. You may not consider it mind reading but our ability to understand what people are thinking and feeling from their facial expressions and gestures is just that.

My paper entitled “Using motiongrams in the study of musical gestures” was accepted to ICMC 06 in New Orleans. The abstract is: Navigating through hours of video material is often time-consuming, and it is similarly difficult to create good visualization of musical gestures in such a material. Traditional displays of time-sampled video frames are not particularly useful when studying single-shot studio recordings, since they present a series of still images and very little movement related information.

We have started a collaboration between between UiO and AHO, and some of the music technology students followed courses with the interaction designers at AHO this spring semester. This was a great success, and I was impressed with what came out of it. Henrik Marstrander has worked on a table interface where he can control various musical parameters, and Jon Olav Eikenes and Marie Wennesland has made a multi-touch multi-touch interface modelled after Jeff Han.

Apple and Nike has teamed up and released the Nike+iPod package, which allows for using an iPod Nano as a pedometer and share the training information online. It is based on a wireless accelerometer (1.37 x 0.95 x 0.30 inches, 0.23 ounce, using a proprietary protocol at 2.4GHz) and a receiver that connects to the iPod (Size: 1.03 x 0.62 x 0.22 inches, 0.12 ounce). Suggested price is US$29, which is very cheap thinking about the included accelerometer.

{.imagelink}Sonic Visualiser from Queen Mary’s is yet another software tool for visualizing audio content. However, there are some features that stand out: Cross-platform: available for OS X, Linux, Windows GPL’ed Native support for aiff, wav, mp3 and ogg (but what about AAC?) Annotations: Support for adding labelled time points and defining segments, point values and curves. The annotations can be overlayed on top of waveforms and spectrograms Time-stretch Vamp Plugins is at the core of the Sonic Visualiser, and it seems like they want this to become a standard for non-realtime audio plugins.

Katherine Wilson writes about how she underestimated blogging when she got started: At the start I underestimated what it could be used for. It’s a database, a diary, a place to jot down notes that don’t fit anywhere else, a place to stake out your research territory, a self-promotion tool, an information bank, an ideas exchange, a support community, a progress-log, a device for self-discipline, confidence-tracker, a complaints department, a file storage system.

Marc Hedlund at O’Reilly summarizes the good things about PDF books: - They are searchable. They are portable. They can often be bought and downloaded immediately. I am still trying to decide what I think about this. In general I prefer to have all articles and reference literature available as PDFs in my digital library, currently organizing them using DevonThink Pro. As computer screens are finally getting bigger, brighter and with higher resolution (even the new MacBook is sporting 1200x800 pixels on the 13 inch screen), it is becoming increasingly more pleasant reading on screen.

{.imagelink}The installation Spatial Sounds (100dB at 100km/h) by Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van der Heide. Spatial Sounds 100 dB at 100 km/h was set up at Usine-C during the Elektrafestival. A speaker is mounted on a metallic arm, rotating around at different speeds dependent on the people in the room. Ultrasonic sensors detect the distance to people in the space and changes the sound being played as well as speed of rotation (more technical info here).

Found an interesting thread on the Max list entitled Working with Max is not easy. But what is easy. Before we learn something we find it difficult. When we know it we find it easy. I guess a problem with Max, if it can be called a problem, is that its low entry-level (at least compared to many other programming languages) is that the user might be misleaded into thinking that this is something that can be mastered in two weeks.

Came across the web page of Frank A. Russo, and found a very interesting paper on Hearing Aids and Music discussing the auditory design of hearing aids: Whether the hearing aid wearer is a musician or merely someone who likes to listen to music, the electronic and electro-acoustic parameters described can be optimized for music as well as for speech. That is, a hearing aid optimally set for music can be optimally set for speech, even though the converse is not necessarily true.

Steve Lawrence discusses the importance of online research papers in the paper Online or Invisible?: The results are dramatic. There is a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited, and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online. […] Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy, and speed scientific progress, author and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.

{#image164}We are currently working with the Phantom Omni haptic devices at McGill, but unfortunately they are rather expensive. I have been looking forward to test the Novint Falcon which is supposed to sell for around $100, but after being in touch with the company it seems like they will not start shipping devices before next year. I really think such devices will change the way we work with computers. The computer experience has been 2-dimensional way too long, and from my initial testing of 3D haptic devices shows how much potential is lying in this type of human computer interaction.

I had to brush up on my trigonometry to solve some mapping issues, and found this nice overview. Strange how much I have forgotten about these things, I really need to get back to my linear algebra books! I never really understood the point of learning those vector transformation things back when I studied maths, but now as I have to implement some 3d gesture models I see that it is actually very useful.

Just went to a lecture by Sidney Fels from the Human Communication Technologies lab and MAGIC[]{#mce_editor_0_parent} at the University of British Columbia (interestingly enough located in the Forest Sciences Centre…). He was talking on the topic of intimate control of musical instruments, and presented some different projects: GloveTalkII: “a system that translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface.” Iamascope: a caleidoscope like thing, where users would see themselves on a big screen, as well as controlling a simple sound synthesis.

My post over at the Open Sound Control forum: I guess we are all trying to get rid of MIDI, but as long as we have tons of gear around, it would be good to have a generic way of describing MIDI information in OSC. Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but I have looked around and haven’t found any suggestions for a full implementation of MIDI messages as an OSC address space.

Edward Tufte has an interesting Wired article entitled PowerPoint Is Evil. The main point is that PowerPoint forces people to create presentations in a certain way, and he especially comments on the problems of bullet points. I have made quite a lot of PowerPoint presentations over the years, and I clearly see his point. It is, indeed, easy to fall into the habit of creating lots of bullet points covering everything you want to say.

Today I went to a guest lecture by Marije Baalman on WaveFieldSynthesis (a spatial sound reproduction principle based on the Huygens principle) over at Concordia. I heard a demonstration of WFS at IRCAM a couple of years back, and it was good to (finally) get a good theoretical introduction to the field. They are usually testing it with 24 speakers, but they are now going to make a permanent 900 speaker setup at the Technical University in Berlin for creating a surround WFS setup.

LibriVox is a voluntary project set up to record all books in the public domain and make them available, for free, in audio format on the internet. Besides the joy of having audio books, this is also very interesting from a speech/voice research perspective. Another source for open-source text files is the French Incipit blog. Interestingly enough, I found a French version of Nicholas Cook’s introduction to music!

{.imagelink}SPEAR is an application for audio analysis, editing and synthesis. The analysis procedure (which is based on the traditional McAulay-Quatieri technique) attempts to represent a sound with many individual sinusoidal tracks (partials), each corresponding to a single sinusoidal wave with time varying frequency and amplitude. It offers some great features, and I particularly like the possibility to easily select single partials and edit them directly. Most controls also work in realtime.

Last week I participated in the Teatrix workshop organized by BEK at USF Verftet in Bergen. The idea was to explore technology in a stage setting. The people participating were: Paola Tognazzi, H.C. Gilje, Gisle Frøysland, Marie Nerland, Trond Lossius, Thorolf Thuestad, Tim Place, Iver Findlay, Linda Birkedal, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Georges Gagneré, Anders Gogstad. The most interesting for me was the chance to work together with Tim Place and Trond Lossius on Jamoma, and during the week we had the chance to discuss and develop quite a lot.

Bob L. Sturm at UC Santa Barbara: {.imagelink}VLDCMCaR (pronounced vldcmcar) is a MATLAB application for exploring concatenative audio synthesis using six independent matching criteria. The entire application is encompassed in a graphical user interface (GUI). Using this program a sound or composition can be concatenatively synthesized using audio segments from a corpus database of any size. Mahler can be synthesized using hours of Lawrence Welk; howling monkeys can approximate President Bush’s speech; and a Schoenberg string quartet can be remixed using Anthony Braxton playing alto saxaphone.

John Lazarro writes on the Auditory list: *Apple released a software update today for iPods, that lets users set a maximum dB level for the device, and lets parents lockdown the maximum dB level of their children’s iPod with a combination lock. Apple also put up a website on how to use the feature to limit long-term hearing damage. *

Daniel Rozin has made some Wooden Mirrorsfrom various materials. Any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.

Forbes.com writes about Charles Jorgensen who is working on what he calls subvocal speech recognition. He attaches a set of electrodes to the skin of his throat and his words are recognized by a computer even when he is not producing any sound.

Just got to know that I got a paper accepted at the Music and Gesture 2 conference. The presentation will focus on new techniques for representing musical gestures (i.e. physical movement) and how they have been implemented in the Musical Gestures Toolbox.

I also recently got to know that two papers I have been co-authoring have been accepted to NIME in Paris. One is called “Towards a Coherent Terminology and Model of Instrument Description and Design” and the other “Towards a Gesture Description Interchange Format”. The idea in the latter is to develop a set of gestural descriptors as a GDIF to match the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) which has been around for some years.

Mark just pointed me to the web page of Spectra Symbol, a company making membrane switches and linear position sensors. I particularly like the circular position sensor!

Nature News writes about a recent discovery of how rats running through a maze tend to have a backwards replay of the route when resting: As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space. But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting.

{.imagelink}Metadata Hootenanny is a tool for easy adding metadata (annotations and chapters) to QuickTime files. It also has a nice timeline function, showing the frames (or only keyframes) of the movie file, where it is possible to easy navigate and add chapter information. Seems like an easy way of adding information quickly to movie files, although it does not have any more advanced features as found in real annotation software.

A short overview of various video annotation software: - Anvil by Michael Kipp is a java-based program for storing several layers of annotations, like a text sequencer. Can only use avi files. Intended for gesture research (understood as gestures used when talking). - Transana from University of Wisconsin, Madison, is developed mainly as a tool for transcribing and describing video and audio content. Seems like it is mainly intended for behavioural studies.

d.tools is a hardware and software system that enables designers to rapidly prototype the bits (the form) and the atoms (the interaction model) of physical user interfaces in concert. d.tools was built to support design thinking rather than implementation tinkering. With d.tools, designers place physical controllers (e.g., buttons, sliders), sensors (e.g., accelerometers), and output devices (e.g., LEDs, LCD screens) directly onto form prototypes, and author their behavior visually in our software workbench.

Stanford on iTunes provides access to a wide range of Stanford-related digital audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s popular music jukebox and online music store. The project includes two sites: a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which includes Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, sports, and more. an access-restricted site for students delivering course-based materials and advising content.

Apple has patented a new Integrated sensing display: On Jan. 12, the US Patent & Trademark Office revealed Apple’s new patent application titled “Integrated sensing display.” This is certainly the year of the integrated camera, as this patent presents. An integrated sensing display is disclosed. The sensing display includes display elements integrated with image sensing elements. As a result, the integrated sensing device can not only output images (e.g., as a display) but also input images (e.

I first came across the Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control project a couple of years ago, and still find it a very funny!

I have been struggling with figuring out the easiest way of converting MPEG-2 .MOD files coming out of a JVC Everio HD camera to something else, and finally found a good solution in Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip which allows for converting these files to more or less all codecs that are available on the system. It is also a good idea to rename the .MOD files to .M2V or .

“retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. […] retrievr is based on research conducted by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington: Fast Multiresolution Image Querying (1995).”

I came across the piece Notjustmoreidlechatter by composer Paul Lansky, showcasing a fascinating use of voice for creating musical rhythm and texture. And then I found the article Digital thoughts where he explains some of his compositional ideas throughout the years.

Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson starts with these nice sentences: The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

I came across a nice site with demonstrations of auditory illusions. There is also the page of Diana Deutsch.

In a rather bizarre Wikipedia discussion about the flatness of Earth, I found an interesting statement: - At the scale of less than 10^-9 meters or so, the earth is a space has an undefinable shape. From about 10^-9 meters through to about 10^4 meters, the earth is flat. From about 10^4 meters to about 10^9 meters the earth is a sphere. At the scale of anything greater than about 10^9 meters, the earth is a point.

I have been reading up on hypertext and hypermedia theory and looked around for papers on hypermusic. One of the few papers I found on the topic was by John Maxwell Hobbs describing his 1998 piece Web Phases.

The CNMAT people have made a forum at the Open Sound Control site. OSC is a way of communicating musical information between devices, much in the same way as MIDI, but without all the problems of MIDI (low resolution etc). Although OSC seems to have gained ground in the research community, I think we all have to support it more if it is ever going to be accepted by the commercial industry.

The concept of mirror neurons was discovered at the University of Parma, Italy some years back, and shows how we have the same neural activitiy whether we do a movement ourselves or just watch someone else doing it. NOVA has made an excellent documentary about mirror neurons.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen has some interesting thoughts on academic English: “With the total dominance of Microsoft Word, the result is comparable to that of the total dominance of English (or, for most of us, EFL). Everything is compatible with everything else; yet, many of us feel, even if we cannot prove, that it shapes our thoughts in insidious ways.”

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web is a good list of reminders for writing web pages: Write for a reason Write often Write tight Make good friends Find good enemies Let the story unfold Stand up, speak out Be sexy Use your archives Relax!

Looking for some references to nonlinear writing and hypertext, I ended up on the web page of Project Xanadu started by Ted Nelson in 1960. I read about it many years ago, when the web was still quite young, and it was fascinating to read more about the ideas of true nonlinear writing.

Looking for frameworks for storing metadata, I am trying to understand more about the current state of MPEG-7, a “multimedia content description standard” and the MPEG-21 multimedia framework.

“The pedar system is an accurate and reliable pressure distribution measuring system for monitoring local loads between the foot and the shoe.” www.novel.de

Some interesting thoughts on the meaning of a PhD from “Nathaniel Worther” the pseudonym of an engineer hunting for a job these days: Chronicle Careers: A Change of Heart