Creative High-school Project, December 2011

Right before Christmas each year, the Christian Senior High-school in Trondheim sets all of its freshers in motion for a grand scale production. Some 150 students work together during an intensive week to produce a final show comprising of dancers, actors, singers, band and film-clips. All the elements of the show are fully integrated through the storyline of the project. In addition to those who are on stage there are also a number of ‘behind the scenes groups.’ These included a cooking group who provided treats for the whole project; a ‘good deeds’ group who did community work and collected a lot of clothes to be sent to a charity in Eastern Europe; a costume and scenography group that worked with the actors, dancers and the stage; a stage design and stage attire group who worked with musicians, singers and with the stage design; a photography group who prepared an exhibition in one of the halls, plus provided visual content for the screens during the show; and finally, the editorial group who documented the whole project through films that were shown during the morning meetings, an official blog and through a number of different social media.

The tag line for the project was ‘real image.’ At the morning meetings all students were gathered, and through those meetings we aimed to establish both a Biblical view and a practical life approach, and to marry them together. We put a particular focus on this at the first morning meeting to set the pace for the rest of the week. At the first meeting, all the group-leaders came up on stage and talked about their personal relation to image and self-worth. To bring in further angles to the topic we also used a number of video presentations. And since it’s a creative project in Norway we showed a few ski-movies, base-jumping films and music videos just for fun and to loosen up everyone’s shoulders a bit.

With 11 production-groups in motion and a team of professional creatives leading them, I was hired to coordinate the project and lead all groups towards the same final goal. A lot of admin and meetings, but I also got to sneak off to hold a master-class in sound-engineering and lead some of the stage-building work.

A week is a short time for a production this size, but the students and leaders really put in the effort and the final production was something to be proud of for everyone! The feedback from the regular staff was very positive and it was said to have been one of the best projects to date.

The show was on the same day as the School’s final Christmas celebration and the day was ended with a big meal for all the students at the in-house sport’s hall, before they went off to a Christmas service in church. A great punctuation mark to the semester before the holidays!

You can read the official blog by the editorial group with pictures and film here.

The 'Music Technology Days' Conference, Norway 2011

 The Rockheim Museum

The Music Technology Days (Musikkteknologidagene) is an annual Norwegian academic conference. In October 2011 it took place in Trondheim’s own museum of rock, Rockheim. It was hosted by the Department of Music at The Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU). NTNU has over the last decade established itself with a very solid Music Technology stream both for under-graduate and post-graduate students.

The interactive wall of Norwegian recorded music

At Rockheim you can test your DJ'ing skills

Yours truly behind an old SSL mixer from Fagerborg Studio in Oslo

The Music Technology Days is predominantly held in Norwegian language, but receives talks in both English and the other Scandinavian languages close to Norwegian. In addition to Norwegian papers and projects, the 2011 conference also saw a collection of presenters from Sweden, Germany and the UK and at least one visitor from Iceland. The evenings had a number of concerts by students and staff from NTNU and there was plenty of time for mingling and looking around the museum.

Below you’ll find a complete list of the presentations that took place. Most Norwegian and Swedish project titles have been translated for the purpose of this post, but originally there were a mix of English, Swedish and Norwegian project titles. Titles translated from Swedish are marked [S] and translations from Norwegian are marked [N], this to clarify when the titles are my translations of the authors’ works. I have written a few lines about the works I took most note of and have provided as many links as possible (some of the links will inevitably be in Scandinavian languages). These are my personal comments, so for further information about the presentations I encourage you to contact the respective presenters or look up their works. I would also like to stress that there is no quality-judgement between those I have written about and those I have not. Some of those I have not written about were on the borders of my areas of competence so I’ll leave it up to someone better suited to comment.

You can find the official programme for the event here. It is in Norwegian, but has all the links provided by the university in it.

Svein Berge ‘Harpex’

Svein Berge has collaborated with Natasha Barrett on developments in higher order Ambisonics. I’m afraid some of the technicality behind what they do is beyond me, but one of the ideas is to split up auditive happenings into different frequency bands and make Ambisonics process them more like we know the human psyche does. The system sounded very natural when demonstrated. As I am more likely to be on the user side than the developer side I found it interesting how you can pan around in a sound-sphere by using a simple interface. The results sounded incredibly convincing and if you use headphones it can also be used with a head-tracker.

Håkon Kvidal and Sigrid Jordal Havre both are or have been undertaking research in Norwegian schools on the use of modern music technology:

Håkon Kvidal ‘Music on tablet computer’ [N]

Håkon Kvidal of the Norwegian Academy of Music has years of experience in working with music technology in education. He has also contributed with research and texts on a national level for a long time. Currently he is conducting a study where he uses iPads with a selection of apps to deliver a music module. The apps are easy to get into and create an entry point for digital literacy in music and sound, but have little in common with a traditional musicological approach. It will be an interesting space to watch since the field is totally new.

Sigrid Jordal Havre ‘Play to learn’

Sigrid Jordal Havre has undertaken a research project where students could use computer technology to jam with each other or play music on their own. The software used was jam2jam and it allows you to create a musical output by using a selection of software instruments. The software allows you to work as a group and rearrange other people’s choices or grab their instruments. In the first sessions this lead to a lot of digital fighting between the students (everyone tried to grab the drum-kit etc.) As the project progressed this gradually changed and the students became increasingly interested in developing a product together. All sessions were recorded on video and have been meticulously dissected.

Maja Bugge ‘Invisible – scenic sound-walk for children’ [N]

Maja Bugge has created a project at a public library where children can come and take part in a show where all the audio is presented on headphones. The stage is the whole library where they are lead around by the narration and various actors. The project comprises narration and sound on the headphones, and dancers and actors at the premises. The story is created as a mystery and the children are in a way taking part in solving it as they explore the whole space of the library in the hunt to solve the riddle. Children were used as “consultants” in the making of the experience.

Gary Bromham ‘Man in the machine or machine in the man – the ever changing role of music technology in popular music culture” (Keynote, day 2)

A grand tour in the history of modern music production covering topics like technology developments, recording media, the sound of different types of equipment, the loudness war and much more. With Bromham’s extensive background from music production this was probably one of the most exciting talks of the whole event, but one that would be hard to sum up in just a few lines…

Professor Gunnar Ternhag ‘Building terminology in the taught subject of Music Production’ [S]

Musicologist Gunnar Ternhag points to three main spreaders of music production terms in education: Software, books and lecturers. He has studied the quantity of terms are in use in a number of music production softwares and he also argues that these softwares are often more effective in establishing lingual terms than the lecturers are. Books, which are often written in English present foreign terms that you may or may not wish to hold on to. Ternhag presented his method of testing and choosing effective expressions to communicate the desired knowledge.

Ternhag runs a well-recognized programme in Sound and Music Production (For English, click here) at the Dalarna College in Sweden. There is currently a new book out that he has authored together with a number of Scandinavian music production academics. It’s called “På tal om musikproduktion,” that from Swedish translates into “On music production,” or more literally “Talking about music production.” It is a collection of articles that touches on a variety of topics in music production.

Andrew Scott ‘Listening, learning and teaching’

Andrew Scott has done a study of how people traditionally have learned a craft and how various philosophers from antiquity till today comments on different modes of learning. Scott takes a particular interest in apprenticeships and argues strongly for a practical real world approach to learning.

Professor Øyvind Brantsegg ‘Listening skills and DSP’ [N]

Professor Brantsegg and his team have together with an Irish and two other Norwegian institutes developed a system for web-based studies to train and test students’ knowledge of DSPs through listening. The system is used as a part of NTNUs regular DSP module, but it can also be delivered as an online module. For the regular students the concepts are still taught in the classroom, but with the additional web-based training they’ll have more opportunity to dive into the world of sound in their personal study time. The system is also automatically correcting your performance. If you continuously mix up chorus and flanger it will suggest you spend more time studying the sound of those processes. This feedback mechanism multiplies the time the lecturers put into each student.

Ola Nordal ‘Arne Nordheim’s Ode to the Light’ [N]

Arne Nordheim was one of the great 20^th century profiles in Norwegian arts music. Ola Nordal is currently writing his PhD thesis on Nordheim at NTNU in Trondheim. In his talk Nordal examined one of Nordheim’s works; how and why it was created and it’s public reception and legacy. The work was created to play continuously from a sculpture called ‘Ode to the Light,’ or ‘Ode til Lyset’ in Norwegian from 1968. You can read Ola Nordal’s blogpost from the conference here.


Tone Åse and Andreas Bergsland ‘Voice meetings – a meeting between performer and researcher’ [N]

Musician Tone Åse and researcher Andreas Bergsland, both of NTNU in Trondheim, has teamed up to examine the audience response from Åse’s vocal/ electro acoustic performances. Tone Åse was one of the concert-holders the night before, so most delegates had already seen her perform before the talk. Their research showed that what you aim to communicate is not always what comes through, and they looked at ways to develop her performance to better communicate with audiences. Seen from my more commercial angle, I think it is a brave move of Åse to develop her art along with the audience-feedback provided through the research. Åse and Bergsland have some valuable lessons to teach us in the area where new and groundbreaking arts meet an audience.

Gerhard Steinke ‘The Subharchord story’

Steinke joined the East-German radio in 1947 as a sound-engineer and was one of the developers behind the Subharchord instrument. His presentation was a very entertaining and in-depth history of the instrument and the state of the current surviving instruments. –One of which (albeit currently not in playable condition) is placed at the Ringve Museum of music and musical instruments in Trondheim, where he travelled off to after the conference. Mr. Stenike will be releasing a paper on the Subharchord in German at some point during 2012.

Professor Øyvind Brandtsegg ‘Hadron’

Hadron is a synthesizer plug-in created by Brandtsegg and his team at NTNU. It performs several types of granular synthesis and has an easy to use interface that allows you to morph between these types of synthesis. Hadron has the capacity to be a useful tool both for commercial music producers and experimental sound-artist looking to create new sounds.

Natasha Barrett (Keynote, day 1): "Ambisonics, spatial ontology and invisible music"

Claus Sohn Andersen: "Resirkulator"

Gary Hoffman: "Bringing music back to music technology"

Tor Halmrast: "Pass for ørene ... ørene lukkes"

Jøran Rudi: "Questioning the authentic - soundscapes as social constructs"

Hans T. Zeiner-Henriksen: "Musikkteknologi som autentisitetsmarkør"

Simon Emmerson (Keynote, day 3): "What is live about electronic music?"

Alex Gunia: "Live electronics / 300 acting spaces"

Notto J W Thelle: "Making Sensors Make Sense: challenges in the development of digital musical instruments"

Professor Anne Danielsen: "Samspillet mellom live-musikk og digitale musikktjenester"

Mats Claesson: "The Kjell-Tore project"

Arnfinn Killingtveit: "Undervannshode"