News

It has now been confirmed that the Sensing Music-related Actions project will move into new spaces in a building called Veglaboratoriet. The building, which used to house various types of chemical laboratories, is located next to the computer science building. The downside is that we will be farther away from the music department (10 minutes to walk...), but we will be one floor up from the robot lab of the ROBIN group, the partner in our new project.

The new space consists of 2 large and 3 smaller rooms, and will provide for a permanent "movement lab", an open working space for master and PhD students, as well as offices and storage. We just need to move some furniture and old light armature before we can start moving in.

We are happy to announce that Alexander Refsum Jensenius will start as a post-doctoral fellow, and Ståle van Dorp Skogstad will start as a doctoral fellow in the project from 1 August.

Research coordinator Anne Cathrine Wesnes shot a bunch of pictures during the "Open lab" tour we gave for new music students last week. The lab is now starting to get together, and we have decided that the official opening ceremony will be Friday 26 September 1215-1300.

We are happy to announce that the Swedish company Qualisys will give a demonstration of their motion capture system during our kickoff-seminar .

MA student Boye Riis jr. and PhD student Ståle Skogstad presented their research projects at the international summer school in Sound and Music Computing (SMC) in Genova 9-11 June 2008:

Boye Riis jr.: The eboy sound computing system

Ståle Skogstad: Sensing music-related actions

Ståle and Alexander have been taking part in the development of a sensing device for the SUM project, with built-in biosensors (BVP, GSR), pressure (FSR) and a 3D accelerometer. The device is currently being used in an installation by Lars Graugaard and Bruno Herbelin at Huset in Denmark during the Re-New festival.

Master student Boye Riis jr. defended his MA thesis project in musicology today. The project has resulted in development of several digital music instruments, and a dissertation entitled "eBoy". [PDF]

Professor Rolf Inge Godøy is at the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference in Kobe, Japan, presenting the paper:

Godøy, R. I. and Jensenius, A. R. (2009). Body movement in music information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Kobe, Japan. [PDF]

FourMs will host an international workshop on motion capture in music 12-16 October 2009, with guests from McGill University and University of Jyväskylä. There will be three public lectures: 

We are currently moving from the old to the new blogging system at the university. The new location of the blog will be www.fourms.uio.no/blog/ .

During the semester opening week, August 2009, music student Hoang Viet Phi Uy demonstrated the interactive music table he built together with Kyrre Glette during the course "Sound programming 2" at Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. The table is using computer vision software from the Reactable project.

We are happy to announce the publication of our new book:

Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman (2009). Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning. New York: Routledge.

Postdoctoral researcher Alexander Refsum Jensenius just published the book “Musikk og bevegelse” (Music and movement). This is a text book in Norwegian giving an overview of theory and methods used in the study of music-related movements.

Researchers from the SMA project have taken the initiative to start up a new course called Music and Movement (Musikk og bevegelse) this semester. This course will introduce students to the theoretical backgrounds for studying body movement in a musical context, as well as give practical experience with various methods for analyzing music-related body movements. Several researchers from the Department of Musicology as well as some guests will lecture in the course. The course is taught in Norwegian, and more information can be found here .

Courtesy of BEK , we have set up a new web page for the Gesture Description Interchange Format (GDIF) at gdif.org . The web page is accompanied by the new GDIF mailing list that can be used for discussion. Happy GDIF"ing!

We congratulate Eirik Renton on finishing his master thesis entitled Collecting Sensor Data for Active Music , and invite to the open examination Friday 3 July 2009, 11:15, at FourMs .

See below for the abstract.

Kristian presented his Nymophone2 at the paper sessions on NIME 2009 in Pittsburgh last week.

We invite you to an Open lab at fourMs Monday 25. May 12:00 - 17:00.

Kl 12:00-15:00

Infrared motion capture

Control sound in 3D

Interactive music table

Interactive robot

3D-printing

Master student presentations

Kl 15:00-17:00

Student presentations Sound Programming 2

Alexander participated in a panel session called "Emotions in Music and Sound" during the 15th International Conference on Auditory Display ( ) in Copenhagen. His contribution to the panel was to focus on the importance of body movement in our understanding of emotions in music.

We have posted some pictures from the Open Lab at Flickr .

Presentation at Gesture Workshop , 25-27 February 2009, Bielefeld, Germany:

R. I. Godøy, A. R. Jensenius, and K. Nymoen: Chunking by coarticulation in music-related gestures

Presentations ESCOM 2009 , 12-16 August, in Jyvåskylä:

R. I. Godøy, A. R. Jensenius, and K. Nymoen. Coarticulation of sound and movement in music. In Proceedings of ESCOM 2009: 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, Jyväskylä, 2009.

A. R. Jensenius, S. A. v. D. Skogstad, K. Nymoen, J. Tørresen, and M. E. Høvin. Reduced displays of multidimensional motion capture data sets of musical performance. In Proceedings of ESCOM 2009: 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, Jyväskylä, Finland, 2009.

Rolf Inge Godøy held a keynote presentation entitled "Sound, movement, keyframes, and interframes", and Alexander Refsum Jensenius presented a paper on "Methods for Visualising Music-Related Movements in Time" at the conference Musical Body: Gesture, Representation and Ergonomics in Performance organised by the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, School of Advanced study 22.-24 April.