For my year-long StillStanding project I am generating videograms for all the scenes. Since there is not much motion in these 10-minute recordings, they typically look like stripes. Looking at today’s recording of an unspectacular hotel room in Kongsberg, I noticed how different the horizontal and vertical videogram look: It is fascinating how two averages of the same video recording can be so different. The explanation is simple; they are based on averaging in two different dimensions (horizontal and vertical).

People often refer to “sound and video” as a concept pair. That is confusing because, in my thinking, “sound” and “video” refer to very different things. In this post, I will explain the difference. Sound and Audio In a previous blog post, I have written about the difference between sound and audio. The short story is that “sound” refers to the physical phenomenon of vibrating molecules, such as sound waves moving through air.

What is the difference between sound and audio? I often hear people confuse the terms. Here are a couple of ways of thinking about the difference. A good summary can be found in this blog post: Sound is vibrations through materials Audio is the technology to hear sounds coming from natural or human-made sources Another good definition is that audio is electrical energy (active or potential) that represents sound. From this, a sound recording is stored as an audio file.

Terminology is always challenging. I have previously written about definitions of actions and gesture several times (e.g. here, here, and here) and chapter 2 in the book Musical gestures: sound, movement, and meaning (Routledge, 2010). Movement vs motion There are, however, two words/terms that I still find very challenging to define properly and to differentiate: movement and motion. In Norwegian, we only have one word (bevegelse) for describing movement/motion, which makes everything much simpler.

I was involved in a discussion about the difference between some terms that are frequently used: analysis, data processing, feature extraction, etc. To summarize my thoughts on how these terms are related, I made the little sketch below: {width=“260” height=“227”} Rather than just storing it in my digital archive, I thought it might be useful for others, and could also hopefully lead to some interesting comments.

Dear child has many names. In [[this call]{style=“text-decoration: underline;”}]{style=“color: #0000ee;”} for a special journal issue on music and robotics, I see the use of the word music content processing (MCP). I have been around in the larger music technology community for a while now, but I haven’t really thought of this as a concept in itself before. Using Google as a reference, I see that “music content processing” actually returns 34 100 hits, so obviously it is being used quite extensively.