To nourish the development of INTIMAL and to review technologies of sonification of body movement, I have attended during the last two months to very interesting workshops organised by fourMs at the Department of Musicology-University of Oslo. These have invited me to think of the many different options to listen to the body by using technologies from an artistic perspective. For instance, in the Interactive Sonification workshop led by Dr. Thomas Hermann from Bielefeld University, I experience listening to data collected from body movement, stimulating new forms of research and creative interaction; in the Bela workshop-talk led by Andrew McPherson from Queen Mary University of London, I experimented with processing of sound in a reliable and fast way, exclusively with physical computing, inviting me to think of the creation of new interfaces; and in the Biophysical Workshop led by the performance artist and scholar Dr. Marco Donnarumma, from Berlin University of the Arts, we explored the XTH Sense instrument, which invites to listen to the body in a direct way (an interesting inner listening perspective) by amplifying muscles’ sound. Last week, I attended to the SoundTracer Workshop: Music Information Retrieval, at the National Library of Norway organised by the SoundTracer project , exploring retrieval of “in large music libraries through the movement of the phone in the air”. Olivier Lartillot, designer of MIRtoolbox demonstrated the first prototype of an IPhone app retrieving Norwegian Folk Music. These different perspectives are opening my ideas for both analysis and interaction using body movement in the context of the INTIMAL research.
