Jan Berg

Digiwall: an interactive climbing wall

Digiwall is a climbing wall enhanced with hardware and software. It combines the computer game with sport climbing, and extends both concepts with new features. Digiwall frees the user from focusing on a computer screen. Instead sound and music are used to convey the gaming experience. The Digiwall concept is designed to support a large number of games, competitions, challenges and even aesthetic experiences. It is an example of how technology can promote physical activity and engage peoples senses and capabilities in a way that traditional computer gaming and sport climbing do not.

Narrative Music, Visuals and Meaning in Film

Narrative media music, music used for narrative purposes in multimedia such as film, television or computer games, is becoming one of the largest sources of musical experience in our daily lives. Though typically experienced on an unconscious and unreflected level, this kind of music actively contributes narrative meaning in multimodal interplay with image, speech and sound effects. Often, what we (think we) see is to a large degree determined by what we hear. Using Halliday’s (1978) metafunctions of communication as a starting point, two short film scenes (from Jaws and The Secret of My Success) are examined, with a focus on the intermodal relationships of music and image. The examples illustrate how musical and visual expressions combine to form multimodal statements where the whole is certainly different than the sum of the parts.

REMUPP: an interface for evaluation of relations between musical parameters and perceived properties

New media offers new roles, functions and challenges to music, calling for new methods and tools for music research. To meet these increasingly important challenges. REMUPP, a new software tool for the investigation of relations between music and perceived properties or characteristies, was designed. The ideas behind REMUPP and the technology used to realize it is deseribed. In order to test the sensitivity and validity of REMUPP. a simple experiment aimed to examine some properties of music was carried out. 38 subjects were listening to music and instructed to indicate their priority for different aspects of the music (musical parameters) while they actively controlled these aspects. The results show that REMUPP is able to bring out significant differences between the musical parameters, and that these differences correspond well with findings by others.

A Qualitative Approach to Evaluation of Perceived Qualities of Audio and Video in a Distance Education Context

This study presents a qualitative method for collecting and analysing data to describe audio and video quality. Used in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, this approach relies on phenomenol ...