Google Wave – first impressions

The long-awaited Google Wave invitation finally arrived this week. We had talked about it with Olivier, as judging by the previews, it looked like just the tool for our research group’s planning and communication needs.
Google Wave has been hyped up and so the queue to get to test it was long. And it seems people [...]

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Virtually academic

So, yesterday’s MATLAB Virtual Conference was fun. The venue is still open, people are still hanging out there, filling in user surveys, downloading materials and chatting to each other. Can’t help but think that the people still around are those whose flights back home are later today…
As I said yesterday, this is, and [...]

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MATLAB Virtual Conference

Technology is awesome. The high point of geekism and nerdity of this year is the MATLAB Virtual Conference. This, I dare to predict, is The Future. As flying across the world is increasingly difficult to justify for environmental reasons, building virtual meeting places and having virtual gatherings and learning to work in online communities is [...]

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World Science Festival 2009: Snowball, the dancing cockatoo

Here’s Snowball, the sulphur-crested cockatoo that can dance to a beat.Prior to this, I had only seen the video of Snowball that’s on YouTube, and shorter snippets recorded by Ani Patel and his team who studied Snowball’s movements and measuring synchronisation with music. Previously, we thought that only humans could synchronise their movements with auditory [...]

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ESCOM 2009

The seventh triennial conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, or ESCOM2009 started today in Jyväskylä. We’ve got approximately 300 international guests, and 5 days of talks and networking ahead of us.
The conference delegates are now gathered at the Martti Ahtisaari -hall of the University of Jyväskylä. The first keynote of [...]

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Tutkimuksen päivä ja Musiikki ja Tunteet -päivä

Laitoksella vietettiin perätysten kahta tutkimustulosten viestintään liittyvää päivää. Järjestyksessä toista Tutkimuksen päivää juhlittiin perjantaina 8. toukokuuta, ja lauantaina oli Brain Tuning -hankkeeseen liittyvän kansainvälisen Music & Emotion -tapahtuman vuoro.

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Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix

This is great… From the description of the video in YouTube: “Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound. Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar. 8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass. 3.5 inch Harddrive as the gong. HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner [...]

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Music & Emotions – methodological issues

(Apologies for the delay in posting this…) At last week’s colloquium we talked about studying music and emotions. To guide us through some of the conceptual thickets and around methodological potholes concerning music and emotions, Jonna Vuoskoski had prepared a presentation. The presentation (see below) did start a lively discussion, some of the topics can [...]

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Hope in the air

19:40 As the US national anthem now rings, it’s time for me to go skiing. This has been a historical occasion, and Obama’s speech was masterful. This has been a social event, isn’t it amazing how you can feel connected just by virtue of a facebook status feed, a network of blogs, Twitter tweets, jaikus [...]

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Two sides of a coin

The work to update the curricula in the faculty is currently on the way. In the music department, this has meant a more profound process. Instead of just tweaking the list of courses we offer (and expect students to complete, one way or another), we are trying to figure out what competencies should a graduate [...]

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