This is the source code for the book Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments by Alexander Refsum Jensenius, published by MIT Press 2022.
This is a techno-cognitive book about how new technologies are shaping the future of musicking.
What is a musical instrument? How do new technologies change how we perform and perceive music? What happens when composers build instruments, performers write code, perceivers become producers, and instruments play themselves? The answers to these pivotal questions entail a meeting point between interactive music technology and embodied music cognition, what author Alexander Refsum Jensenius calls "embodied music technology." Moving between objective description and subjective narrative of his own musical experiences, Jensenius explores why music makes people move, how the human body can be used in musical interaction, and how new technologies allow for active musical experiences. The development of new music technologies, he demonstrates, has fundamentally changed how music is performed and perceived.
The book is written by Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Professor of Music Technology at the University of Oslo and Director of RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion.
This repository includes the final version of the LaTeX files, LibreOffice drawings, and photos sent to the publisher at the beginning of the production process. It is the so-called accepted manuscript. Many small things happened during the production process, so the content here deviates slightly from what is in the final book.
If you are mainly interested in the content of the book, you should grab a free copy of the final version. This repository will probably be more interesting for students and researchers that want to look at the LaTeX source, including bibliography, and figures. The latter may be the most interesting, including seeing how I made the figures in LibreOffice Draw and using a script to generate the final PDFs.
The book has primarily been written in Sublime Text on Ubuntu.
As an Open Research advocate, I am interested in exploring how the research process can be fully opened. While the end products of research activities are increasingly becoming freely available, the research process is often within a "black box". As a university researcher, teacher, and leader, I feel responsible for pushing for new solutions, and this is one such attempt.
The book is published with a CC-BY-NC-ND license.