Day 17, Friday, 26.06.09

- Last visit at the hospital before leaving, as something has remained in my eye

- I received a few patches that may work in the latest version of Eyesweb, for extracting some useful information from the Indian singing classes that I have access to. Technical limitations (lack of background, multi-blob tracking with overlapping etc) didn't allow even preliminary results.

- Discussions with Maurizio about the differences/relations of fluidity/smoothness in motion and the respective computations.

Day 16, Thursday, 25.06.09

- Short discussion with Corrado Canepa about his own projects.

- Short meeting with prof. Camurri. There is a need of thorough field research (discussions with musicians, musicological analysis) - it seems that the already existent know-how wouldn't apply easily on a totally different musical culture. Perhaps mimicry (teacher-student) can be studied with parallel covariance computations (as there is a reference point), but still there is a need of basic research in sound.

- Short project presentation of the Eyesweb group to local authorities.

- Interesting references on:

(1) the relation of music to speech: McNeill, Kendon on complementary aspects of gesture and voice

(2) Mental images of motion: Zohan Eitan

(3) Musical gesture and musical grammar: Lawrence Zbikowski

Day 15, Wednesday, 24.06.09

Bankholiday in Genova - department is closed.

Day 14, Tuesday, 23.06.09

- Discussion with Gualtiero Volpe about possible methodologies.
First: obervation and informal or formal interviews with musicians
Second: conclusions on the important aspects that are communicated between teacher and student
Third: setup an experiment for measuring the physical aspects related to them
Fourth: analysis of higher-level attributes
Fifth: Try to find similarities and dissimilarities in relation to teacher's performance on the basis of covariance.

- Discussions with maestro Roberto Doatti about possibilities of applying electroacoustic approaches of music and imaginery (Emmerson, Smalley) to Classical Indian Music, as they both share common ground in focusing on sound itself rather than symbolic notion.

- Building up a patch in Eyesweb for measuring Quantity of Motion in a video of Classical Indian Singing class (Ustad Zia Farudiddin Dagar and Nirmalya Dey).

- Studying the PhD 'Measuring musical interaction: analysis communication in embodied musical behaviour' by Nikki Moran

Day 13, Monday, 22.06.09

- Gualtiero is busy with exams, so we will have the meeting tomorrow. Expecting the patches.

- Observation of videos.

Day 11/12, Weekend, 20-21.06.09

The department is closed.

Day 10, Friday, 19.06.09

- Eyes are getting slowly but steadily better.

- Studying of Matt Rahaim's PhD.

- Interesting brief discussion with Paolo Coletta about technical issues related to video and audio recordings and analysis in favor of doing research on the hypothesis. Tracking shall be done either based on colour (skin colour) 

- Observation of classical indian singing videos on Youtube.

- Will wait for the patches on fluditity/impulsiveness from Gualtiero, in order to try to apply them on videos that are available to me.

- The laboratory will be closed on the weekend.