Aktuelle-saker

Even Bekkedal and Catherine Støver have both recently graduated from Department of Musicology, after writing their theses on topics related to the SMA project.

Senior research fellow Alexander Refsum Jensenius has just published a paper entitled “Some video abstraction techniques for displaying body movement in analysis and performance” in the MIT Press journal Leonardo.

Senior research fellow Alexander Refsum Jensenius has just published a paper in Computer Music Journal together with Victoria Johnson. The paper is based on the experience of developing the piece Transformation for electric violin and live electronics (see video of the piece below).

We are happy to announce that the ZigFlea board is currently available from Seedstudio. The board provides an easy way of using ZigBee wireless communication together with Dan Overholt’s CUI32Stem sensor interface.

[This position has now been filled] We are happy to announce an open PhD position that will be affiliated with the fourMs research group. 

New fourMs publications at the Sound and Music Computing conference in Copenhagen:

New publication by Kristian Nymoen, Rolf Inge Godøy, Jim Torresen, and Alexander Refsum Jensenius.

Postdoc Alexander Refsum Jensenius received a best paper award at ACHI 2012 - The Fifth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions, for the paper Motion-sound Interaction Using Sonification based on Motiongrams. More information about the paper can be found at his web page. 

fourMs researchers are presenting 4 papers at this year's NIME conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. See below for details:

We are very happy to announce that the fourMs proposal to become a Norwegian Centre of Excellence has been selected as a finalist. The second round will be decided on in the autumn. 

We believe in the importance of passing on the interest for music technology to the coming generations. Kristian visited an elementary school to do so last month. 

The pupils formed a laptop orchestra, and rehearsed the piece Clix by Ge Wang. Furthermore they explored sound interaction with the musical gestures toolbox and sensor interfaces like the "music snake".

Alexander Refsum Jensenius recently presented the paper “Motion-sound Interaction Using Sonification based on Motiongrams” at the ACHI 2012 conference in Valencia, Spain.

Abstract: The paper presents a method for sonification of human body motion based on motiongrams. Motiongrams show the spatiotemporal development of body motion by plotting average matrices of motion images over time. The resultant visual representation resembles spectrograms, and is treated as such by the new sonifyer module for Jamoma for Max, which turns motiongrams into sound by reading a part of the matrix and passing it on to an oscillator bank. The method is surprisingly simple, and has proven to be useful for analytical applications and in interactive music systems.

See below for the full paper and video examples.

Visiting researcher Yago de Quay and fourMs PhD student Ståle Skogstad and Postdoc Alexander Refsum Jensenius have published a paper in Leonardo Music Journal:

ABSTRACT: The authors present an experimental musical performance called Dance Jockey, wherein sounds are controlled by sensors on the dancer's body. These sensors manipulate music in real time by acquiring data about body actions and transmitting the information to a control unit that makes decisions and gives instructions to audio software. The system triggers a broad range of music events and maps them to sound effects and musical parameters such as pitch, loudness and rhythm.

Kristian Nymoen and Alexander Refsum Jensenius had a short appearance on NRK Dagsrevyen today (Norwegian prime time news). The video is online here (starting at 27:00).

Postdoctoral researcher Alexander Refsum Jensenius has been interviewed by the Norwegian music magazine Ballade, in an article entitled Dr. Luftgitars laboratorium .

Rolf Inge Godøy has published the chapter "Sound-action chunks in music in the new Springer-Verlag book Musical Robots and Interactive Multimodal Systems edited by Kia Ng og Jorge Solis.

The electronic version of Roger Stein Grading's M.Sc. thesis is now available online:

Even Bekkedal, Yago de Quay, Ståle A. Skogstad, Kyrre Glette and Kristian Nymoen participated at Idefestivalen om digitalisering which was held at the University of Oslo main campus on September 17th. 

Bjørnar Hegge's M.A. thesis is now available online (Norwegian only):

The electronic version of Øyvind Hauback's M.Sc. thesis is now available online:

Two new publications by Rolf Inge Godøy:

Ståle Skogstad and Kristian Nymoen presented two new publications at the Sound and Music Conference in Padova. 

The publications are:

Skogstad, Nymoen and Høvin: Comparing Inertial and Optical MoCap Technologies for Synthesis Control

and

Nymoen and Jensenius: A Toolbox for Storing and Streaming Music-related Data

Kristian Nymoen and Ståle A. Skogstad were interviewed during the poster session at NIME 2011 on Tuesday:

http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/01/morgendagens-musikkinstrumenter/#more-20461

Texas Tech Discoveries has published a story called "Movement and Musical Meaning" where they present Bill Westney's work and his participation in the NNIMIPA workshop in Oslo last year. During the workshop we made video recordings of a recital (including rehearsal) and motion capture recordings in the lab. 

Josué Moreno and Davis Ozolins from the Sibelius Academy are visiting fourMs this week through the collaboration in the Nordic Network for the Integration of Music Informatics, Performance and Aesthetics (NNIMIPA). They are editing and cataloguing the video material collected during the February 2010 NNIMIPA workshop in Oslo, where American pianist William Westney who participated in various motion capture and analysis experiments.