What are the digital competencies needed in the future? Our head of department has challenged me to talk about this topic at an internal seminar today. Here is a summary of what I said. Competencies vs skills First, I think it is crucial to separate competencies from skills. The latter relates to how you do something. There has been much focus on teaching skills, mainly teaching people how to use various software or hardware.

I am super excited about our new Nordic Sound and Music Computing Network, which has just started up with funding from the Nordic Research Council. This network brings together a group of internationally leading sound and music computing researchers from institutions in five Nordic countries: Aalborg University, Aalto University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of Iceland, and University of Oslo. The network covers the field of sound and music from the “soft” to the “hard,” including the arts and humanities, and the social and natural sciences, as well as engineering, and involves a high level of technological competency.

It has been fairly quiet here on the blog recently. One reason for this is that I am spending quite some time on setting up the new Music, Communication and Technology master’s programme. This is an exciting collaborative project with our colleagues at NTNU. The whole thing is focused around network-based communication, and the students will use, learn about, develop and evaluate technologies for musical communication between the two campuses in Oslo and Trondheim.

{.description .introduction} We are happy to announce that “Music, Communication & Technology” will be the very first joint degree between NTNU and UiO, the two biggest universities in Norway. The programme is now approved by the UiO board and will soon be approved by the NTNU board. www.uio.no/mct-master www.ntnu.edu/studies/mct This is a different Master’s programme. Music is at the core, but the scope is larger. The students will be educated as technological humanists, with technical, reflective and aesthetic skills.

I have written a chapter called From experimental music technology to clinical tool in the newly published anthology Music, Health, Technology and Design, edited by Karette A. Stensæth from the Norwegian Academy of Music. Here is the summary of the book: This anthology presents a compilation of articles that explore the many intersections of music, health, technology and design. The first and largest part of the book includes articles deriving from the multidisciplinary research project called RHYME (www.

To follow up on my previous post about the differences between browser plugins, web interfaces and desktop applications, here is another post about my current rethinking of computer habits. In fact, I started writing this post a couple of months ago, when I decided to move back to using Apple Mail as my main e-mail application again. I had used Mail for a few years when I decided to test out Thunderbird last year.

Nowadays I have a hard time deciding on what type of application to use. Only a few years back I would use desktop applications for most things, but with the growing amount of decent web 2.0 “applications” I notice that I have slowly moved towards doing more and more online. Let me use this blog as an example. It is based on WordPress, which now offers a good and efficient web interface.

Just as I started to believe that Ubuntu had matured to become a super-stable and grandma-friendly OS, I got an unexpected black screen on boot of Ubuntu 10.04 on a Dell Latitude D400. After some googling I have found a solution that works: On boot, hit the `e’ button when the grub menu shows up. Then add the following after “quiet splash”: [i915.modeset=1]{style=“font-family: monospace;”} If this works and you get into the system, you can do this procedure to change the grub loader permanently:

The world is becoming a huge collection of plugins. I hadn’t tried Google Chrome in a while, and just realized that not only has it become much more stable since the last time I battled with it, but I also find more or less all my favourite Firefox extensions being ported. This blog post is a test to see how ScribeFire behaves under Chrome. While am at it, I also installed the WPtouch extension to my WordPress install to see if that could help making my web page more accesible on mobile devices.

Google recently added CalDAV support to the calendar, and this tutorial explains how to set it up with various programs, including iCal, Outlook, Sunbird and Thunderbird.

I have been remodelling my web page today, installing the latest version of Wordpress, and testing out a new theme and organisational structure. I have been using categories for a while in my blog, but have not used the tags feature because I didn’t really understand the difference before I read this: Categories can be tags, sure, but not all categories are tags, and not all tags should be categories. I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book.

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.

I held a guest lecture at the speech, music and hearing group at KTH in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and got a tour of the lab afterwards. There I got a demonstration of the Optitrack optical motion capture system, which, as compared to other similar systems, is an amazingly cheap solution starting at $4999. Obviously, it has lower accuracy and precision than the larger systems, but then it also costs 1/20 of the price… However, 100 Hz speed and millimeter precision is decent for a USB-based system, and the cameras are really portable (10x5 cm or so each).

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/”}

Dutch company Softkineticoffers what they call natural interfaces, i.e. interfaces where you don’t have to put on any sensors to interact: Softkinetic operates with a single depth sensing camera, requires no marker (no gamepad, no wiimote, no special gloves or clothing, no headset - nothing), and works under all lighting conditions and scene settings (at home, in a fitness center, an amusement park, a classroom, a game cafe, an industrial simulation room - anywhere.

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.

I am working on a paper for a journal that only accepts RTF documents, and to avoid the possible problems resulting from converting a LaTeX document into RTF (or possibly from PDF), I decided to try using a word processor from the beginning. For simple word processing I have grown very found of Bean recently, a lightweight application slightly more advanced than TextEdit. I started out with Bean, but since I had to include endnotes in the document I ended up moving over to NeoOffice instead.

Wired reports that Apple has filed around 200 patent applications related to multitouch and gesture control: Yet it appears that the company is not trying to patent the entire multitouch concept, but rather trying to protect certain uses of it – specifically the methods to interpret gestures, and in some cases, the gestures themselves. It is interesting to see that they mention the interpretation of a gesture. This means that they separate between gesture and action, i.

I just heard Esteban Maestre from UPF present his project on creating a database of instrumental actions of bowed instruments, for use in the synthesis of score-based material. They have come up with a very interesting solution to the recording and synchronisation of audio with movement data: Building a VST plugin which implements recording of motion capture data from a Polhemus Liberty, together with bow sensing through an Arduino. This makes it possible to load the VST-plugin inside regular audio sequencing software and do the recording from there.

I just heard a presentation by a group of researchers from the Tril centre (Technology Research for Independent Living) in Dublin. They have developed Emobius (or EyesWeb Mobius), a set of blocks for various types of biomedical processing, as well as a graphical front-end to the forthcoming EyesWeb XMI. It is fascinating to see how the problems they are working on in applications for older persons are so similar to what we are dealing with in music research.

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.

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.

I had my first go at restoring a file using Time Machine today. Looking for a Keynote presentation, I realised that I had kept only the PDF of the presentation and not the original presentation file. Not really sure how that happened, but, anyway, the file was lost. I have had Time Machine running on my computer ever since I upgraded to X.5, and have been wondering whether it would be worth the extra CPU peaks that appear every hour or so when it activates and copies changed files.

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}

I just learned about Eduroam: Eduroam which stands for Education Roaming, is a RADIUS-based infrastructure that uses 802.1X security technology to allow for inter-institutional roaming. Being part of eduroam allows users visiting another institution connected to eduroam to log on to the WLAN using the same credentialsusername and passwordthe user would use if he were at his home institution. Depending on local policies at the visited institutions, eduroam participants may also have additional resources at their disposal.

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 complaining about the poor support for eLearning solutions at the University of Oslo for some years. I have tried Fronter, but find it too closed and rigid for what I want to do. I like that course information is open and easily available for everyone, but so far the standard course pages have been very much focused on basic information only. I recently discovered that things have improved a lot under the surface, and that it is now possible to give students access to add information to folders under the course web sites.

{#image457}The MTG group at Pompeu Fabra reports that Björk will use the Reactable in her upcoming tour: With her first tour concert at the Coachella Festival in California, the Icelandic singer Björk introduced the reactable for the first time to a mainstream audience. Our instrument will form a key element of the artist’s current world tour “Volta” which will appear at numerous music festivals during the next 18 months. I have tried the Reactable at various conferences and it is great that this innovative collaborative instrument gets some attention outside the music tech community.

A Microsoft demo of surface computing, showing several prototypes of “gesture control” (what I would call action control) in software.

Made a visualisation of the structure of my web page with this DOM Visualizer Applet. {#image451 width=“460” height=“444”}

There are very few items that make me happy every time I use them, but my Sandisk SD memory card is one of them. I have had it for around a year, and it seems to be some of the most ingenious industrial design during the last years. It makes cables unnecessary, as I simple flip it open and connect it to a USB port. Brilliant! In the beginning I was very afraid that it should break, but I have been using it a lot over the last year without any problems.

I have been thinking a lot about GUIs, namespaces and control parameters over the last couple of days. One of the big challenges we are facing is how to make technology more human-friendly. Often it seems that technology controls us more than we control the technology. Creating a user interface of any kind is very similar how we think about mapping in musical instruments. In essence, any type of control is one, or several, layers of mapping between one set of parameters to another.

The AudioPint project at MIT aims at creating a computer based system that is as portable and stable as hardware gear: Consider a system that is small, lightweight, tough, able to be powered up, plugged in, and it used immediately - but with sounds that can be controlled by any computer-compatible input device, opening wide the space of expressive possibilities. Devices supported include midi controllers, joysticks, mice, touchpads, or any other custom controller that can connect to a computer!

Jon Olav Eikenes has posted information about his diploma project on control of sound spatialisation at the department of interaction design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. As a co-adviser I think it is great to see an interdisciplinary project working so well. I hope we can get more of this type of collaborative projects in the future.

Came across the web site of MIT course MAS.960 Principles of Electronic Music Controllers, which has some interesting references and links tovarious resources on NIME development. It is also worth checking out many of the student projects.

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.

I went to a speech on surround mixing (5.1) last night by Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering. He spent a lot of time talking about gear and technicalities of mastering, and also discussed the different stages in mastering for various formats SACD, DVD-Audio etc. An interesting thing he commented on is the fact that when Dolby Digital is downmixed to stereo in consumer gear, the LFE channel is left out. So he advised to use the LFE (.

TagCrowd is an online tool for creating tag clouds from any text to visualize word frequency. Tag clouds have become popular on Flickr and a number of other social web sites. I really like the idea about tag clouds since they can quickly visualise the content of a text by summarise (and quantify relationships among) the most important words in a text. Does anyone know about a standalone software that could create tag clouds of large texts?

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 .

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 wrote this blog entry several months ago, but never posted it because I thought I would have time to go back and evaluate the sounds more. Since I don’t see that happen any time before I finish my dissertation, I just go along and post it now: Microsoft has posted some info and examples of the Vista soundscape. The sounds are designed by Robert Fripp and will be some of the most well known sounds on the planet in not too long.

A great little movie about the internet (html, xml, hypertext, etc.) by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University.

{.imagelink}NOVINT has finally got around to release Falcon the much awaited first, cheap haptic controller. I have my doubts about how solid the thing is, at least when I know how fragile the many times more expensive Phantoms are. Nevertheless, Falcon will finally introduce haptics to everyone.

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 (?

DropDMG is a wonderful little program that will create a disk image from any type of file, folder, CD or DVD you drop on it. If the rest of the world could be just this easy…

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.

Gregory Taylor has made an interview with Tim Place about Hipno. It is interesting how he comments about the Hipnoscope control: The Hipnoscope does something that I’m quite proud of, which is that it allows you to quickly audition a plug-in and some of its possibilities. But at the same time it really rewards those who are patient explorers that spend time really focusing on subtleties offers. I still find myself surprised at the results I get sometimes - the Hipnoscope creates this palette where there is an almost infinite range of subtlety with some of the plug-ins.

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.

{#image361}If you ever wanted some nice, pink noise in the background while working on your computer, Noise is the tool! Apparently, lots of people use this to try and shut out more distractive sounds. While I would prefer a program doing noise-cancelling (which would probably be tricky using the built-in microphone since it would also detect your own sounds while typing on the keyboard), this actually works ok.

Gustav pointed me to Nettradio, a great little tool for adding a bunch of Norwegian radio stations to iTunes.

This video shows WiiMote used as a mouse on windows.

Jamie just pointed me to YouOS, an operating system running entirely within a web browser: YouOS and its applications run entirely within a web browser, but have the look and feel of desktop applications. An application’s code and data reside remotely but are executed and modified locally. This model allows for a great deal of freedom. You can edit a document at home in a text editor and then go to school or work and instantly access the same text editor and document.

M-Audio has released MidAir a wireless MIDI transmitter and receiver system. {width=“460” height=“250”} The system is also able to synchronize between several performers. I just wish that some of these large companies would start to use OSC one day…

USB rechargeable AA Batteries: {#image326}

Just learned that it is possible to get auto-completion with the Esc and F5 Keys in all Cocoa applications. Just start typing, hit the button and you will get a list of matches. {width=“193” height=“426”}

Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Set headphone volume level on Intel Macs If you’ve got a new Intel-powered Mac, here’s a feature you may not have even known you had. For years, all Macs have had the ability to have different volume levels for different inputs. Plug in a USB-powered iMic, for instance, and you can set its output volume level independently of that of your internal speakers.

Seems like the Arduino community is growing quickly. Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board, and a development environment for writing Arduino software. The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, itself built on Processing. At the moment I am very happy with the Phidgets interfacekits for my electronics work, but as soon as I am done with my dissertation I will get into the Arduino/Wiring/Processing world.

An interesting review of the new Sony HDR-SR1 HDD based HD video camera. Except for the fact that there are no decent video software to edit this type of video format, and the lack of support for OS X, this looks like a great camera.

Just back from the 1st Nordic Music Technology Conference organized by NTNU in connection with Trondheim MatchMaking organized by TEKS. This is the follow-up conference from Musikkteknologidagene which I organized in Oslo last year as an attempt to gather people working within the field. Ola Nordahl has posted some nice pictures from the Opening day, where Paul Lansky held a great keynote about his compositions (check out his music page for examples of his work).

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.

*{#image275}Philips Research is currently showing off a their new Photonic Textiles at the IFA Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin. The Photonic Fabric integrates flexible arrays of multicolored LEDs into the weave, allowing the fabric to give off light and display programmable patterns like text messages, without compromising the softness of the cloth. Philips’ Photonic Textile Prototypes include an “SMS pillow” and an “SMS Backpack” (send a text message to it and words scroll across it).

As part of the Musikkball project, we are making a “music ball troll” for the science fair Forskningstorget in Oslo next week. I have been looking for a solution to make the setup as self-contained as possible, and this includes building a Mac mini into the speaker box founding the base of the “troll”. What is great with the mini is that it is possible to run it headless (without any attached mouse, keyboard and monitor), and control it using Chicken of the VNC from my MacBook.

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.

Firefox Scholar is a set of extensions to the popular open source web browser that will: - Recognize and capture metadata from online objects (e.g., author, title, publication information of books) Collect documents, images, and citations from the web Allow materials to be sorted, annotated, and searched The program will be free and will replace programs like EndNote, while operating completely within the browser window. A beta of Firefox Scholar will be available in the summer of 2006.

I am getting adjusted to my new MacBook and have realized that the remote control is a funny little thing. Cool features: Works with Keynote Holding down play button puts the computer to sleep Shows up as “Apple IR” using HI in Max/MSP, so that it can be used for controlling anything there. Only problem is that I can’t turn off the system functions while using it in Max. To avoid people taking control over a presentation, here’s a short description of how it is possible to pair the remote:

Soundflower from Cycling ‘74, a small freeware utility allowing internal audio routing under OS X, is available in Universal Binary for MacTel computers. Soundflower is similar to Jack, and while the latter has some more advanced features, I find Soundflower easier to use. They are both perfect for recording for example streaming audio.

{#image261}I have been using the JVC Everio GZMC500, one of the first hard drive based video cameras with a decent price tag and ok features, for more than half a year and my general impressions are very positive. Positive things: No tapes!!! 3CCD, excellent for recording in dark concert/lecture halls Very small and handy Negative things: No microphone/line input (this was a major drawback with this model, but luckily the built-in stereo microphone is not too bad…) Storing files in an MPEG-2 format which is probably good for writing directly to DVD, but a hazzle to work with on a computer (at least Macs) since they have to be re-encoded to something that is more easily playable in QuickTime.

{#image244}RtFFT by Gary P. Scavone is a fairly basic realtime spectrum analyzer. It can simultaneously display an arbitrary number of FFT signals, which correspond to the spectra of data input from one or more channels of your computer soundcard. The plot window can be zoomed to any arbitrary limits. Controls are provided for the FFT size, the window type, and window averaging.

{#image241}The Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. […] The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame.

{.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.

The Reactive Sound System adds sounds to the current soundscape, either to mask for example speech, or to make unpleasant sounds more pleasant. They have also developed an acoustic curtain with a microphone and flat speakers which can work with the system.

Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, observed that computer processor complexity approximately doubled every eighteen months. This observation has become famous as “Moore’s Law” and predicts that computer performance grows exponentially. Thus we expect a fairly new (circa 2005/06) computer running modern software to perform a simple task like word processing much more quickly than a vintage computer (circa 1988/89). After all, should be approximately 28 times more powerful. Well, as the story Vintage Macs with System 6 Run Circles Around 3 GHz Windows 2000 PC shows, the old systems clearly beat a new computer when it comes to start-up time and word-processing.

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.

{#image212}M-Audio has released the MidAir USB MIDI controller which is basically a wireless version of Oxygen 8. It is great that more things are going wireless, but in case of this MIDI controller I don’t think it helps much that you can drop the USB cable when you instead have to use an external power supply…

Apple has recently filed an interesting US Patent Application:* * The invention generally pertains to a hand-held computing device. More particularly, the invention pertains to a computing device that is capable of controlling the speed of the music so as to affect the mood and behavior of the user during an activity such as exercise. By way of example, the speed of the music can be controlled to match the pace of the activity (synching the speed of the music to the activity of the user) or alternatively it can be controlled to drive the pace of the activity (increasing or decreasing the speed of the music to encourage a greater or lower pace).

Nils pointed me to a new java plug-in for pure-data. It is modeled after mxj in Max/MSP, which should make it possible to exchange java classes between the platforms.

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.

Native instruments states that KORE should be the new universal sound platform solving “all problems” in large music software setups. Basically, it works as a generic host for plugins (VST and AU) that can be used in sequencers, and it comes with a hardware controller to facilitate the control. The argumentation is convincing and the pictures nice, but it seems like this “new” product only scratches on the surface of the real problem.

Seems like everything is getting USB-connectivity these days. The Samson condenser microphone has been out for a while, and not Behringer is releasing a . iAXE393 USB-guitar, the Ultimate Electric Guitar with Built-In USB Port to Connect Straight to Your Computer. Jam and Record with Killer Modeling Amps and Stomp Boxes. Seems like it only outputs digital audio, though. Would have been interesting if it had had a built-in audio-to-MIDI (or even better to OSC) converter.

{.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.

{.imagelink}int.lib is a set of abstractions/javascripts for Cycling 74’s Max MSP software that facilitates the control of multiple parameters by navigating a two dimensional visual environment. It implements a gravitational system, allowing the user to represent presets with variable sized balls. As the user moves around the space, the size of the balls and their proximity to the mouse cursor affects the weight of each preset in the interpolated output. int.

Nintendo Wii features a wireless controller, with rumbling, sound and some kind of motion sensing (probably a 3D accelerometer?). It is good to see that such things are finally making their way into commercial products, and it will be interesting to see if we can use this for music making as well. {#image188 width=“500”}

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.

Orbicule has some interesting computer theft software for Apple computers. If stolen the Undercover software will take pictures at regular intervals with the built in i-Sight and send to the user together with information about the network location of the computer. It can also cause a hardware “failure” so that the computer will have to be sent for repair where the theft will be noticed.

{#image172}A memorable show during the Elektrafestival was the Laser Sound Performance by Edwin van der Heide. He used two lasers and (I think) motorized mirrors and filters to create laser patterns on the wall and in the smoke filling the space. The sound was mostly sine tones, sawtooths and various types of noise at an extremely loud level (even with ear plugs). Not really sure how he did it, but there was a really tight synch between the movement of the lasers and the sounds.

{.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).

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.

From the web site of the Wireless Networking in the Developing World project: The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost. We hope to not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how we have made such networks work, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community.

{#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.

It took me a couple of weeks to discover that much-rumoured Google Calendar has finally been released. I have tested it, and it looks and works very well. As many other Google services it is ajax based, so that the whole page does not have to be reloaded every time you do an edit. Not entirely as functional as a standalone application, but a dream to work with compared to other online calendars.

I have started to like Google suggest. It is surprisingly fast, even for unconventional search names. It would be even better if it could also incorporate some quick info about the top results of the searches that you are browsing through.

In a blog note questioning Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly writes that Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it’s not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company.

{.imagelink}I am reading e-mail using IMAP, and don’t want to store large attachments on the server. Depending on the computer and platform I am working on, I use several different clients (Firefox, Opera, Pine, SquirrelMail), but I am using Apple Mail as my main client. For some time I have been annoyed that there was no way to remove attachments from e-mails. This was based on the assumption that all necessary and relevant features are available in the contextual menus that popup when right-clicking on a message.

In a discussion on using OSC to communicate over networks, Darryl just mentioned that OS X (apparently starting from Tiger) has the possibility to send MIDI messages over the network. I wonder how I have managed to oversee this feature, since it is sitting there as an option right in the Audio MIDI setup. The help file reads: You can use the MIDI network driver to send and receive MIDI information between computers over a network.

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.

A Tour of Microsoft’s Mac Lab with pictures of the hundreds of macs they have running, plus descriptions of how they have automated the testing process.

Interesting comment from Create Digital Music: What I find especially interesting is how far ahead of the curve music software is — just the opposite of what you might expect. We have most drivers already shipping, with nearly all software either shipping already for Intel or promised in the next few months. While support is a bit spotty at the moment if you use a lot of plug-ins, I think most Mac musicians will be able to comfortably switch to Intel by the summer.

Douglas Hofstadter is discussing music and artificial intelligence: Back when I was young – when I wrote “Gödel, Escher, Bach” – I asked myself the question “Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?”, and then proceeded to speculate as follows: “There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs… To think – and I have heard this suggested – that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model ‘music box’ to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit.

{#image113}Dan Trueman and Perry Cook at Princeton have set up an undergrad course called PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra, where they have 15 workstations consisting of Powerbooks, sound cards, sensor interfaces and spherical speakers. The idea is to give students the chance to improvise and experiment with electronic music in a really hands-on way (more info). Great idea! We should try and set up something like that in Oslo.

The Fogscreen is a new invention which makes objects seem to appear and move in thin air! It is a screen you can walk through! The FogScreen is created by using a suspended fog generating device, there is no frame around the screen. The installation is easy: just replace the conventional screen with FogScreen. You don´t need to change anything else - it works with standard video projectors.The fog we are using is dry, so it doesn’t make you wet even if you stay under the FogScreen device for a long time.

Google has a page with all the different Holiday logos they have been displaying. Also came across Logogle where you can make your own Google-style logos, and of course Logoogle with many fake Google logos.

Have been testing the online word processing tool Writely, and it works quite well. It also allows for several people to work on the same document at the same time, and the different edits updates quickly. Zohowriter is another (currently) free online word processor, and it seems like all the major software companies are working on similar concepts. Surely we will see a switch to more internet-based computing in the coming years!

{#image80}I have been thinking about setting up an automatic backup routine on my laptop for a long time, and finally decided to do it. Found what seems to be the two most popular solutions for OS X: Rsyncx and Unison File Synchronizer. RSync is a backup tool while Unison can do two-way synchronization (also between different platforms). I am mainly interested in a simple backup utility, and Rsyncx looks more user friendly, so I have decided to test that first.

{#p75 .imagelink}Quicksilver is a program, quite similar to Butler and LaunchBar, for launching applications and finding files quickly under OS X. Quicksilver is free, open source, looks good, and it seems to be very responsive.

I found a way of getting access to the music files on my windows-formatted iPod on a mac over at Ecoustics: Launch the Terminal.application and type: find /Volumes/[iPod’sNAME]/iPod_Control/Music -print | awk ‘¬ { gsub(/ /, “\ “); print }’ Substitute the name of your iPod for [iPod’sNAME]. Any spaces should be replaced with underscores (_). This will print a list of all the songs inside the Music folder with \ in place of spaces.

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.

I have been using BabelFish for online translation, but I just found out about Google Translate. My small comparisons show up very similar results, so I wonder whether they actually use the same translation engine? And I am also testing out the Ultralingua dictionary. I am mostly interested in the English-French dictionary, but I see that they also have a Norwegian-English dictionary which might be useful.

Read on macosxhints: When running a Cocoa application, you can control-click on any word and select “Look up in Dictionary” from the pop-up menu. This will invoke the new Dictionary application, which will define the selected word. While this is handy, there’s an even quicker method (undocumented, as far as I can tell). Instead of selecting the word, hover the mouse over the word and press Command-Control-D. This will pop-up a a mini-dictionary at the mouse location, containing the word’s definition, as seen at right.

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 .

Just found out that Cycling ‘74 has released a brand new forum. Looks very promising, and it is nice that everything is available as RSS feeds.

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.

Microsoft has made available Windows Media® Components for QuickTime a plugin for playing wm-files in QuickTime. Nice.

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.

I have been struggling with creating video files that are easily playable on both OS X and Windows. Of course it is possible to make an avi with some “ancient” video codec, but that is not very tempting when the new H.264 codec is so nice. Of course, it would be nice if Windows users could use QuickTime, but for those who decline to do so, I found an easy way for converting MPEG-4 files to WMV.

I have been thinking about buying a new video camera. As I start to get very tired of working with dv-tapes, I was curious to check out some of the new hd cameras. Seems like it is still a bit early, as I guess the market will change next year, although this JVC GZ-MC500 camcorder looks very sweet. A 4GB microdrive seems too small, though, and it is unfortunately disqualified since it doesn’t sport a microphone input.

The MIT Media Lab: $100 Laptop aims at making an affordable laptop for poor countries: “The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.”