Rhythm

On a visit to Milan, I came across a stair close to the famous Bosco Verticale that interested me. I passed these stairs several times and struggled with walking them each time. It was equally difficult up and down; they just did not seem to work for me. That inspired this blog post about stair walking. The biomechanics of stair walking Walking up and down stairs is an everyday activity we often take for granted. However, the rhythmic nature of stair walking involves a fascinating interplay of stride length, gait, and challenges posed by different types of stairs. ...

I am on vacation in northern Chile and encountered an interesting staircase in one of our hotels. The uppermost step was a little higher than the others, causing the whole family to stumble almost every time we passed it on the way upwards. Similarly, we always got a few extra centimeters when walking down, making us almost fall over when starting the escalation. This staircase reminded me about action programs, the anticipation of actions based on a perceived rhythm. In this case, the rhythmic nature of the steps of the staircase. Based on ecological knowledge about how staircases typically work, with equally displaced steps, one predicts the actions to climb the staircase. However, when this rhythm is broken, due to one step being slightly higher than the others, it breaks with our prediction. After almost stumbling several times, we began getting used to it, but it still felt weird each time.

Yesterday, I completed my year-long StillStanding project. This was my second year-long project. In 2022, I recorded one sound action daily. When I reached the end of 2022, I found it to be an efficient way of collecting data. My 2023 project confirmed this belief, so I am inspired to try another year-long experiment. Focusing on AMBIENT I will spend the coming month completing the Still Standing manuscript. I am saying this loud now to put pressure on myself and help the world understand why I must focus on writing. Then, I will focus on the AMBIENT project. The project is well underway, and all the 2023 recordings have helped shape my thinking. ...

I have been running Python-based Jupyter Notebooks for some time but never thought about using environments before quite recently. I have heard people talking about environments, but I didn’t understand why I would need it. Two days ago, I tried to upgrade to the latest version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python and got stuck in a dependency nightmare. I tried to upgrade one of the packages that choked, but that only led to other packages breaking. I suddenly also found myself in a situation where one package wanted a newer version of a dependency while another wanted an older version. My approach to installing all the packages I would ever need was not a good idea. Then I realized that this is why people use environments. ...

Today, I stood still in a meeting room with an oddly ticking clock. This was part of my annual #StillStanding project which is documented on my Mastodon channel. There was nothing special about today’s session but the clock. The meeting room was furnished with a large table in the middle, a screen on the wall, and glass walls on both sides. The large ventilation system led to a noticeable low-frequency “hum” dominating the soundscape. As with all such rooms with glass walls, the sound insulation was not particularly efficient, so I could easily hear people walking and talking outside. ...

Yesterday, I completed my 365 Sound Actions project, during which I recorded one sound action per day as part of preparing for the launch of my book Sound Actions. Today, on 1 January 2023, I start this year’s project: recording myself standing still 10 minutes every day. You can follow the progress on Mastodon. Starting up AMBIENT Although I am happy about completing my sound actions project, I have enjoyed the ritual of doing something every day. So I want to continue the tradition with a different project, and I have developed a concept that fits my current research interests. I am currently in the phase of starting up my AMBIENT project. The team is almost in place, and we have had many good initial discussions. ...

1 January this year, I set out to record one sound action per day. The idea was to test out the action–sound theory from my book Sound Actions. One thing is writing about action–sound couplings and mappings, another is to see how the theory works with real-world examples. As I commented on after one month, the project has been both challenging and inspiring. Below I write about some of my experiences but first, here is the complete list: ...

I wrote up the final report on the project MICRO - Human Bodily Micromotion in Music Perception and Interaction before Christmas. Now I finally got around to wrapping up the project pages. With the touch of a button, the project’s web page now says “completed”. But even though the project is formally over, its results will live on. Aims and objectives The MICRO project sought to investigate the close relationships between musical sound and human bodily micromotion. Micromotion is here used to describe the smallest motion that we can produce and experience, typically at a rate lower than 10 mm/s. ...

Like many others, I bought a kayak during the pandemic, and I have had many nice trips in the Oslo fiord over the last year. Working at RITMO, I think a lot about rhythm these days, and the rhythmic nature of kayaking made me curious to investigate the pattern a little more. Capturing kayaking motion My spontaneous investigations into kayak motion began with simply recording a short video of myself kayaking. This was done by placing an action camera (a GoPro Hero 8, to be precise) on my life vest. The result looks like this: ...

I came across a very interesting study on the Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees. The authors have shared the videos recorded in the study (Open Research is great!), so I was eager to try out some analyses with the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab. Here is an example of one of the videos from the collection: The video quality is not very good, so I had my doubts about what I could find. It is particularly challenging that the camera is moving slightly over time. There is also a part where the camera zooms in towards the end. A good rule of thumb is to always use a tripod and no zoom/pan/tilt when recording video for analysis. ...