This site now has a chat page where you can ask questions about me and my research. That is not particularly remarkable in itself; chatbots are everywhere these days. What I find more interesting is that this one runs entirely in your browser. There is no server involved, no API keys, and no data leaving your machine. Your questions are answered on your own hardware, by a language model that your browser downloads and runs locally. Here are some reflections on how it is set up and what I have learned along the way. ...
I have just finished an intensive stretch of work on the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python (MGT-python). Or, to be more precise, various AI agents have done most of the work for me, although heavily supervised by me. It started as “let me fix a few things” and turned into a near-complete modernisation. Here I describe how the toolbox went from v1.3.3 to v1.6.9 within a couple of weeks, including a pile of bug fixing, lots of optimisation, and a pile of new features. ...
Today, we will have a workshop with the MishMash work package leaders, and for that I thought it would be useful to run a new version of the RITMO coauthorship exercise. The goal is to make contribution expectations explicit early, and to practice making fair decisions when contributions differ in type, timing, and visibility. Since MishMash embraces both artistic and scientific research and development, this version is designed for teams working across arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, design, and engineering. ...
I started up Oslo Mobile Orchestra (OMO) in 2009 (originally named Oslo iPhone Ensemble), expanding on Oslo Laptop Orchestra. This was part of teaching courses in sound and music programming at the University of Oslo. We used some ready-made mobile phone apps, including Brian Eno’s Bloom, but also programmed some patches in Pure Data, which we wrapped in MobMuPlat. Now, with the support of Cursor, I have ported a bunch of the old patches to web apps. In this blog post, I explain the process. ...
I participated in the event WISE x HOUSE OF NORDIC VISIONS at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin yesterday. During the opening speech, Philipp Grefer mentioned various numbers for the size of the cultural and creative industries in Europe. His argument was tht the cultural and creativ industries are often treated as a “soft” policy area. However, economically speaking, they are not soft at all. Here is a blog post summarizing some numbers. ...
Earlier today, I wrote about AI and photography based on an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo. During the Q&A session, a musician in the audience said that he felt that the AI systems he had tried behaved so properly and asked if an AI can be “drunk” and whether we could “pour some alcohol into the machine” to make it a little freer and less “stiff” in its creative output. That is a very interesting question, hence this little reflection. ...
Today, I took part in an interesting panel conversation at Fotografiens Hus in Oslo in connection with the exhibition What We Call Real by Camila Urrego. This was the first time they had invited a photographer to exhibit works explicitly made “with AI,” and I was invited to contribute thoughts on the potential of AI for creative practice (in this case, photography). As MishMash picks up speed, I receive many requests for talks and panels on AI and creativity, and I try to say yes when I can make it. I have found this to be an excellent way to think about various AI use cases outside my core focus areas and to meet interesting people. Here are some thoughts based on my preparatory notes and reflections after the event. ...
Earlier today, I attended a lecture by Antonio Somaini at the University of Oslo’s seminar series on aesthetics. There were many interesting things in the lecture, which apparently was based on the manuscript of a forthcoming article. Here, I will focus on one thing that caused my interest: the thinking of latent spaces as an “anarchive”. Latent spaces A latent space is a mathematical representation used in machine learning where complex data (like images, text, or sound) is mapped into a lower-dimensional coordinate system so that similar items are positioned closer together. Instead of storing explicit labels or complete files, models encode underlying features and relationships, enabling interpolation, clustering, and the generation of new outputs by moving through that space. ...
Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There, I introduced a figure based on a combination of Stember’s textual description and Zeigler’s sketch. Making a vector version I published the figure “properly” in my book Sound Actions, and, as described in this blog post), made a vector version (PDF) and source file (ODG) available on GitHub with a CC-BY license. Making a SVG version Recently, I have tried using AI tools to create SVG versions of various illustrations. This has worked remarkably well, including “SVG’ing” the MishMash emblem and the MishMash Cube. One of the cool things about this is that it opens for creative things, like making the MishMash bubbles blink. ...
There were several presentations on the sonification of human body movement at MOCO. This, combined with my recent successes in developing browser versions of both VideoViz and VideoScrub, led me to attempt to revive another old Max patch. Motiongram-based sonification There are many ways of sonifying body motion. Nowadays, we often work with skeleton or marker-based models and advanced synthesis engines. However, two decades ago, I began exploring how to turn motiongrams into sound, treating the motiongram as if it were a spectrogram. I also published a paper on the method in 2012. ...