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.

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.

My PhD student Cagri Erdem developed a performance together with dancer Katja Henriksen Schia. The piece was first performed together with Qichao Lan and myself during the RITMO opening and also during MusicLab vol. 3. See here for a teaser of the performance: This week Cagri, Katja and myself performed a version of the piece Vrengt at NIME in Porto Alegre. We also presented a paper describing the development of the instrument/piece:

I am happy to announce a new book chapter based on the artistic-scientific research in the Sverm and MICRO projects. {.csl-bib-body} {.csl-entry} Citation: Jensenius, A. R. (2017). Sonic Microinteraction in “the Air.” In M. Lesaffre, P.-J. Maes, & M. Leman (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction (pp. 431–439). New York: Routledge. {.csl-entry} {.csl-entry} Abstract: This chapter looks at some of the principles involved in developing conceptual methods and technological systems concerning sonic microinteraction, a type of interaction with sounds that is generated by bodily motion at a very small scale.

The last of the four Sverm videos by Lavasir Nordrum hast just been posted on Vimeo. The first short movie was titled Micromovements, then followed Microsounds and Excitation, and the last one is called Resonance. It has been exciting to work with the video medium in addition to the performances, and it has given a very different perspective on the project.

Video artist Lavasir Nordrum hast just posted the third of four short movies created together with the Sverm group. The first short movie was titled Micromovements, and the second was titled Microsounds. This month’s short movie is called Excitation, and is focused on the first half of an even or action. This will be followed by a short movie called Resonance to be released on 1 January.

As I wrote about last month, the Sverm group has teamed up with video artist Lavasir Nordrum. The plan is that he will create four short and poetic videos documenting four of the main topics we have been working on in the Sverm project. The production plan for the videos is quite tight: we shoot content for the videos during a few hours in the middle of each month, and then Lavasir publishes the final video two weeks later.

[caption id=“attachment_2086” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Alexander holding a keynote lecture at Musikkteknologidagene 2012 (Photo: Nathan Wolek).[/caption] Last week I held a keynote lecture at the Norwegian music technology conference Musikkteknologidagene, by (and at) the Norwegian Academy of Music and NOTAM. The talk was titled: “Embodying the human body in music technology”, and was an attempt at explaining why I believe we need to put more emphasis on human-friendly technologies, and why the field of music cognition is very much connected to that of music technology.