At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities.

There has been much discussion about ChatGPT recently, a chat robot that can write meaningful answers to questions. I haven’t had time to test it out properly, and it was unavailable when I wanted to check it today. Instead, I have played around with YouWrite, a service that can write text based on limited input. I thought it would be interesting to ask it to write about something I know well, so I asked it to write a text based on an abbreviated version of the abstract of my new book:

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.

Ever since I finished my dissertation in 2007, I have thought about writing it up as a book. Parts of the dissertation were translated and extended in the Norwegian-language textbook Musikk og bevegelse (which, by the way, is out of print but freely available as an ebook). That book focused primarily on music-related body motion and was written for the course MUS2006 at the University of Oslo. However, my action-sound theory was only partially mentioned and never properly presented in a book format.

Life is always full of challenges, but those challenges are also what drives personal development. I am constantly reminded about that when I see this picture, which was made by my mother Grete Refsum when I started in school. I think the symbolism in the image is great. The eager child is waiting with open arms for an enormous ball. Even though I am much older now, I think the feeling of starting on something new is always the same.

I have been teaching the course Research Methods, Tools and Issues in our MCT programme this semester. The last class was an “open clinic” in which I answered questions about academic writing. Here is a summary of some of the things I answered, which may hopefully also be useful for others. Formatting Your academic exam paper is not the place to experiment with fancy layout and formatting. Some basic tips:

Last year I decided to use plain text files (TXT) as the main file type for all my computer text input. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one was all the problems experienced when trying to open other types of text-based files (RTF, DOC, etc.) on various iOS and Android devices that I use daily. Another reason is to become independent of specific software solutions, forcing you to use a specific software for something as basic as writing text on your computer or device.

By coincidence I have had several discussions about footnotes, endnotes and different types of citation styles recently. Such discussions often end up in “religious” wars, in which researchers from different disciplines argue why “their” system is the best. I often find myself agreeing with none or everyone in such discussions, since I am working in and between several different disciplines (the arts, humanities, technology, psychology, medicine), and publish my own work in journals that use different ways of handling citations and notes.

I have been working on an ERC Starting Grant application over the last months. Besides the usual conceptual/practical challenges of writing funding applications, this particular application also posed the challenge of writing not only one proposal document, but two: one long (15 pages) and one short (5 pages). I am used to writing research papers and applications where you are dealing with three levels: title abstract content But for the ERC application I had to handle four levels:

I just discovered that it is common to use a comma before and after i.e. and e.g. in American English style of writing. In British English, a comma is inserted before but not after these abbreviations.

I have been using LaTeX for most of my more advanced writing needs for so many years, that I tend to forget that there are so few other good options out there for writing what could be called “complex” documents, i.e. book-sized documents with a good portion of notes, pictures, links, etc. I just had to help out in trying to create a large document based on 30+ individual documents in MS Word.