SUM workshops have been very much in my attention this week. Wednesday 12 at the Art.on.Wires in Olso, Norway and Friday 14 at Pikslaverk, Iceland, with both workshop followed by concerts in the evening. We presented the background and activities of the SUM project, which has come to deal mostly with emotion of various sorts in music, both analysis and synthesis. The SUM workshop in Oslo was joined by Anders Friberg from the Swedish Technical University and Alexander Refsum Jensenius from Oslo University. Anders outlined the history of emotion research in music and outlined our fuzzy emotion analyser and perceptual melody maker, while Alexander gave an overview of the development and present state of the sensor device that will be part of the SUM project once it finishes.

art on wires

In Oslo Aki Asgeirsson sat in at the concert after the first part and spiced the proceedings up with his deliciously noisy and poignant electronics. Later Atau Tanaka joined us performing on his hand-held devices – well, iPhones as they were. It was a good performance – musically flexible and emotionally strong with a nice sonic variation throughout. Atau had made that day’s keynote speech, focusing on performative and social networks of music, with some well-linked historic activities and cross-discipline studies. I suppose the concert was a testimony to our ability to make instantaneous network! Both the Oslo workshop and concert were streamed live, and can soon be heard at a wavelength coming to you from Art.on.Wires and the energetic and imaginative Alex Eichhorn.

The concert in Reykjavik Friday 14 was a pre-opener to the combined Raflost+Pikslaverk festival. I played with Aki again, and later Hilmar Jensson og Siggi Halldorsson joined us en e-guitar and cello – veeery nice!