Dissertation: Action — Sound

[Alexander Refsum Jensenius <a.r.jensenius@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am happy to announce that my PhD dissertation "ACTION – SOUND:  
Developing Methods and Tools to Study Music-Related Body Movement" has  
been accepted for public defense, and is now available for download  
from this address:
http://www.arj.no/research/

Abstract: Body movement is integral to both performance and perception  
of music, and this dissertation suggests that we also think about  
music as movement. Based on ideas of embodied music cognition, it is  
argued that ecological knowledge of action-sound couplings guide our  
experience of music, both in perception and performance. Then follows  
a taxonomy of music-related body movements, before various observation  
studies of perceiver’s music-movement correspondences are presented:  
air instrument performance, free dance to music, and sound-tracing.  
These studies showed that both novices and experts alike seem to  
associate various types of body movement with features in the musical  
sound. Knowledge from the observation studies was used in the  
exploration of artificial action-sound relationships through the  
development of various prototype music controllers, including the  
Cheapstick, music balls, and the Music Troll. This exploration showed  
that it is possible to create low-cost and human-friendly music  
controllers that may be both intuitive and creatively interesting. The  
last part of the dissertation presents tools and methods that have  
been developed throughout the project, including the Musical Gestures  
Toolbox for the graphical programming environment Max/MSP/Jitter;  
techniques for creating motion history images and motiongrams of video  
material; and development of the Gesture Description Interchange  
Format (GDIF) for streaming and storing music-related movement data.  
These tools may be seen as an answer to many of the research questions  
posed in the dissertation, and have facilitated the analysis of music- 
related movement and creation of artificial action-sound relationships  
in the project.

Best,

Alexander Refsum Jensenius
Research fellow
Musical Gestures group
University of Oslo