Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “standstill”
July 1, 2023
Half a year of standing still
Today, I am halfway through my year-long #StillStanding project. Not so much has changed since I summed up the first 100 days. I still enjoy the experience, and there are new things to learn every day.
Here is a 10-minute video I have recorded that presents the project, explains its rationale, and reflects upon some experiences so far:
The biggest challenge moving forward is finding new spaces every day. I have already stood in the most accessible spaces, so I need to spend more time looking for unexplored rooms both at the university and close to my home.
April 10, 2023
100 Days and Still Standing
Today marks the 100th day of my annual #StillStanding project. In this blog post, I summarize some of my experiences so far.
Endurance Some people questioned whether I would be able to stand still every single day for an entire year. But, hey, it is only ten minutes (out of 1440) per day, and even though my life as a centre director is busy, it is always possible to find time for a standstill sometime during the day.
December 30, 2022
Adding Title and Author to PDFs exported from Jupyter Notebook
I am doing some end of the year cleaning on my hard drive and just uploaded the Jupyter Notebook I used in the analysis of a mobile phone lying still earlier this year.
For some future studies, I thought it would be interesting to explore the PDF export functionality from Jupyter. That worked very well except for that I didn’t get any title or author name on top:
Then I found a solution on Stack Overflow.
August 24, 2022
Still Standing Manuscript in Preparation
I sent off the final proofs for my Sound Actions book before the summer. I don’t know when it will actually be published, but since it is off my table, I have had time to work on new projects.
My new project AMBIENT will start soon, but I still haven’t been able to write up all the results from my two projects on music-related micro-motion: Sverm and MICRO. This will be the topic of the book I have started writing this summer, with the working title Still Standing: Exploring Human Micromotion.
August 7, 2022
Analyzing Recordings of a Mobile Phone Lying Still
What is the background “noise” in the sensors of a mobile phone? In the fourMs Lab, we have a tradition of testing the noise levels of various devices. Over the last few years, we have been using mobile phones in multiple experiments, including the MusicLab app that has been used in public research concerts, such as MusicLab Copenhagen.
I have yet to conduct a systematic study of many mobile phones lying still, but today I tried recording my phone—a Samsung Galaxy Ultra S21—lying still on the table for ten minutes.
January 7, 2022
Try not to headbang challenge
I recently came across a video of the so-called Try not to headbang challenge, where the idea is to, well, not to headbang while listening to music. This immediately caught my attention. After all, I have been researching music-related micromotion over the last years and have run the Norwegian Championship of Standstill since 2012.
Here is an example of Nath & Johnny trying the challenge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I4CBsDT37I As seen in the video, they are doing ok, although they are far from sitting still.
August 7, 2018
New article: Correspondences Between Music and Involuntary Human Micromotion During Standstill
I am happy to announce a new journal article coming out of the MICRO project:
Victor E. Gonzalez-Sanchez, Agata Zelechowska and Alexander Refsum Jensenius
Correspondences Between Music and Involuntary Human Micromotion During Standstill
Front. Psychol., 07 August 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01382
Abstract: The relationships between human body motion and music have been the focus of several studies characterizing the correspondence between voluntary motion and various sound features. The study of involuntary movement to music, however, is still scarce.
July 20, 2017
SMC paper based on data from the first Norwegian Championship of Standstill
We have been carrying out three editions of the Norwegian Championship of Standstill over the years, but it is first with the new resources in the MICRO project that we have finally been able to properly analyze all the data. The first publication coming out of the (growing) data set was published at SMC this year:
Reference: Jensenius, Alexander Refsum; Zelechowska, Agata & Gonzalez Sanchez, Victor Evaristo (2017). The Musical Influence on People’s Micromotion when Standing Still in Groups, In Tapio Lokki; Jukka Pa?
March 13, 2016
New project Funding: MICRO!
I am happy to announce that I have received funding from the Norwegian Research Council’s program Young Research Talents for the project: MICRO - Human Bodily Micromotion in Music Perception and Interaction. This is a 4-year long project and I will be looking for both a PhD and postdoctoral fellow to join the team. The call will be out later this year, but please do not hesitate to contact me right if you are interested.
May 1, 2014
New publication: How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications
I am happy to announce a new publication titled How still is still? exploring human standstill for artistic applications (PDF of preprint), published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology. The paper is based on the Sverm project, and was written and accepted two years ago. Sometimes academic publishing takes absurdly long, which this is an example of, but I am happy that the publication is finally out in the wild.
July 13, 2012
Paper #2 at SMC 2012: Noise level in IR mocap systems
Yesterday I presented a paper on motiongrams at the Sound and Music Computing conference in Copenhagen. Today I will present the paper A study of the noise-level in two infrared marker-based motion capture systems. This is a quite nerdy, in-depth study of the noise-level of two of our motion capture systems.
Abstract
With musical applications in mind, this paper reports on the level of noise observed in two commercial infrared marker-based motion capture systems: one high-end (Qualisys) and one affordable (OptiTrack).
March 6, 2012
Norwegian Championship in standstill
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.
November 10, 2011
Motionlessness
Yesterday Miles Phillips{.url} suggested that the word “motionlessness” may be what I am after when it comes to describing the act of standing still. He further pointed me to a web site with a list of the world records for motionlessness. The rules to compete in motionlessness is as follows:
The record is for continuously standing motionless. You must stand: sitting is not allowed. No facial movements are allowed other then the involuntary blinking of the eye.
October 26, 2011
The act of standing still: stillness or standstill?
[caption id=“attachment_1283” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Plots of a neck marker from a 10 minute recording of standing still”][/caption]
As mentioned previously (here and here), I have been doing some experiments on standing still in silence. One thing is to do it, another is to talk (or write) about it. Then I need to have words describing what I have been doing.
To start with the simple; the word silence seems to be quite clearly defined as the “lack of sound”, and is similar to the Norwegian word stillhet.