STSM - Stella Paschalidou

Day 17, Friday, 26.06.09

2009-06-26T04:44:00.000-07:00

- 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

2009-06-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

- 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

2009-06-24T04:50:00.000-07:00

Bankholiday in Genova - department is closed.

Day 14, Tuesday, 23.06.09

2009-06-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

- 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

2009-06-22T02:45:00.000-07:00

- 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

2009-06-20T02:58:00.000-07:00

The department is closed.

Day 10, Friday, 19.06.09

2009-06-19T02:20:00.000-07:00

- 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.

Day 9, Thursday, 18.06.09

2009-06-18T02:04:00.000-07:00

- Replies are coming from the people I have contacted.

- Martin Clayton shares a common interest, finds the connection of sound with gesturing sensible and suggests to work with the material they have in their database at Open University, London.

Formalization of gestures according to some treatise is not evident and probably not possible, but more qualitative analysis in both domains (gesturing and auditory) may reveal interesting points in the hypothesis about embodiment in the oral training of classical indian singing.

- Matt Rahaim sent me his recent PhD and a paper on 'Gesture, Melody and the Paramparic Body in Hindustani Vocal Music' and was very supportive of the idea in some aspects.

- Suvarnalata Rao did not agree with the hypothesis, instead argued that some discussion is available about how to retain you body/facial expressions from being excessive, which is regarded as a negative attribute.

- Discussions with Barbara Mazzarino on the aspects of 'fluidity' and 'smoothness' in the physical gestural domain. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find demonstration patches for this.

day 8 - Wednesday, 17.06.09

2009-06-17T01:47:00.000-07:00

- During the night I felt my eyes swelling - second time at hospital.

Doctor's diognose: bacterial or viral cojunctivitis in both eyes. Will take at least 10 days like this and the medicament doesn't help, but can protect from additional infections.

- Very hard to work - I can hardly see.

- I am starting to contact people in the research area of embodiment and entrainment in the domain of classical indian music. These include Matt Rahaim (recent PhD on ''), Martin Clayton at Open University, Richard Widdess (SOAS - London), Ritwik Sanyal (University of Benares), Suvarnalata Rao (National Centre for the Performing Arts - Mumbai), Sakis Laios (Thessaloniki-Greece), Nirmalya Dey (N. Delhi-India), Nikki Moran (University of Edinburgh) for input to the topic.

- According to Martin Clayton, there is indeed interest, but there methodology is still blurred.

day 7 - Tuesday, 16.06.09

2009-06-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

- Eyes inflammation is annoying.

- Interesting points made by Donald Gowalski during our conversations.

- Online discussions about this and studying of PhDs and papers.

day 6 - Monday, 15.06.09

2009-06-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

- First thing in the morning: hospital for an infection in the eyes. The inflammation that started on Thursday is getting worse. Doctor gave medical treatment. Working on the computer is hard.

- Videos of martial arts and commenting, segmenting according to 'impulsiveness' adjective. This starts giving me ideas about segmenting melodic phrases in classical indian music in parallel to gestures.

- I am in contact with several people on the subject of gesturing during classical indian music singing. A very interesting PhD has been recently been published at Berkeley in the US.

- There will be a need of developing an appropriate methodology and collecting in a controlled way a series of recordings and videos, in case there is no ready material to use.

day 4,5 - Weekend, 13-14.06.09

2009-06-13T02:56:00.000-07:00

The department is closed.

day 3 - Friday, 12.06.09

2009-06-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

- Discussions with Barbara about qualities of movement, in specific 'impulsiveness' in martial arts. I will check a series of videos on Monday and see respective subject's comments on this.

- I have started to contact people about the research project - seems, I am getting contradictory oppinions at the moment.

- During the weekend the laboratory remains closed.

day 2 - Thursday, 11.06.09

2009-06-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

- In the morning we had a discussion with prof. Camurri about the initial research proposal - there is a need for a strong theoretical basis on which a computation model could be developed, relating audio and video analysis in classical indian music performance.

- We arranged work for the next days, that involves mainly video analysis of the multimodal input of a musical performance.

- I spent the rest of the day contacting people and looking for references in respect to the research proposal. It seems to be a complicated matter that has been mainly approached from an artistic perspective (observation), but scientific tools have been applied in less extend.

day 1 - Wednesday, 10.06.09

2009-06-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Travelling from Greece (Crete) to Italy (Genova).