Happy Christmas and New Year

Christmas here is different but somehow similar. The Christmas songs in the shops as well as the decorations are far less obtrusive than in Vienna. Even in the main shopping streets of Tokyo there is far less Christmas kitsch than in the relatively small shopping streets of Vienna. It's such a pleasure not to be overexposed to Christmas before it actually happens!

One of the few noticeable things are the "I believe in Santa Claus" hats the cashiers wear in Kasumi. Which seems a bit odd to me because I'm sure they never have believed in those stories. However, I've been told that some are actually teaching their children to believe in Santa Claus (which makes me wonder if the children are just pretending to believe so that they can get their presents and make their parents happy at the same time).

I've been told that in Japan Christmas is a very important time of the year for couples (and not the family, like in Austria). And there are a lot fewer presents than in the US or Austria. Also New Years Eve seems to be a very quiet celebration which is spread out over several days. Unfortunately I'll probably never experience it myself though... but Rome should be nice too ;-)

Other than enjoying the last days before returning home I've been busy with work (as usual, and it's going really well as usual too), and I've been practicing Karate. In Karate I started using the Japanese numbers when it's my turn to count out loud. I still need to practice getting the order right, especially in the range from 4-8 I tend to get the order messed up if I'm trying to concentrate on the movements of different body parts and at the same time yell out a number in the right rhythm. Sometimes I also mix in both versions of the same number (e.g. 4 is "yon" and "shi"). I have a hard time not laughing at myself when I notice that I did it again, I wonder how the others manage not to change the expressions on their faces.

When we did Katas today (which I really enjoy) anyone who would have been watching us must have thought there is a hidden camera somewhere. Not only was I always delayed, but I was also completely clueless on what to do. It was great! :-)
It seems that they practice Katas on Saturday mornings, so I guess in the future I'll be getting up earlier on Saturdays than I do on weekdays.

I wonder how long I'll have the newbie bonus in the class... and what will happen once I don't have it anymore. Everyone else is sticking exactly to all the rules, the whole practice reminds me of the mechanics of a clock. Every movement is exactly precise, unlike Capoeira there is no informal chat between exercises, everyone is very serious. Unlike Capoeirea you don't hear people talking about "scarita" and "atsui" all the time. ("It's so hot in here and I'm exhausted..") I miss Capoeira a bit, if I'm lucky I'll get a chance to play a bit in Vienna. Oh, and I should mention that after class everything changes. People smile, chat, laugh, drink beer, go out for food or Karaoke... they are extremely nice people.

This is probably my last post before next year. It's been a great year, and I hope yours has been great too.

Engrish

Japanese Engrish is somehow special. Basically there are two popular styles. The more widespread style is the design-style: Engrish words are used as design elements for shop windows, advertisements, t-shirts, etc. It is particularly popular to chose words with several meanings, and concatenate them in very creative ways. The second style is the babelfish-style. This style is only popular in areas with tourists such as Tokyo. It is used to translate important signs and to entertain tourists.

In addition, to make things even more interesting, sometimes the words are first translated into Japanese katakana, and then back to the Roman alphabet. (There is no "L" in Katakana.)

Angela pointed me to www.engrish.com. I think I should start taking more pictures too :-)

Tea Ceremony

I finally got the chance to participate in a tea ceremony. It was a lot more impressive than I expected it to be. At first it seems very simple and plain, but it is full of important details. There is a lot of beauty in the simple utensils, and the tradition has a very interesting history. If I'm not mistaken, politeness and respect play a very important role in the ceremony. There seems to be an infinite number of possibilities to be rude. Some people spend a life time studying the ceremony. One thing I learned for sure is that it is not really about tea. Strangely it reminded me of Karate somehow. Maybe because of the way we were sitting, bowing, and the precision of every detail. Most likely it was the precision of even the smallest movements that reminded me of the Katas in Karate. It was fascinating! I'll probably be adding pictures to this post later on.

Reasons to Celebrate Calendar

In German there is a saying that you have to celebrate when it happens. ("Man soll die Feste feiern wie sie fallen.") For example, you should celebrate your birthday on the day it is, and not a week later! (Buxi!)

Anyway, parties are great, and the fact that we only have one birthday a year shouldn't limit the number of parties we celebrate. So what I am looking for is some web service where I can enter a date and get a list of good reasons to celebrate. For example, someone special was born, or something wonderful happened, the more reasons the better. (And of course it should have some smart filtering system to remove stuff I'm not interested in.)

Furthermore, I would like to be able to personalize the "reasons to party" calendar with personal events in my life. Some of these I might even be willing to make publicly available (such as the first time in my life a teacher locked me out of a classroom).

If anyone knows of such a service, please let me know! Maybe it would be possible to adapt the Wikipedia "what happened today" service somehow?

Almost There!

In 2 weeks I'll be back home. I'm looking forward to see everyone! :-)
I'll be in Vienna until the 29th or so (and then go to Rome).

I hope I'll get all of my 20 plastic bag stamps before that. I only need 3 more! Every time I go food shopping to Kasumi I ask them not to flood me with plastic bags. Every time I do so, they stamp my card. Once I've collected 20 of those stamps they'll donate 100 Yen (that's about 75 cents) to the WWF. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, check out the post by the Sockenpabst (in German). Here are two pictures of my almost full stamp collection :-)
(The card has the size of a credit card.)



And here is the back side:



Here is a picture of another stamp collection from the same food store. I have no idea what it's good for, but I threw the same card away once, and got a new one the next time, so now I'm holding on to it (just so that they don't give me a new one).



I'm realizing now how many of those cards I have :-)
Here is a different one from the restaurant on the AIST site. We usually go to the cheaper cafeteria for lunch, but every time we go to the restaurant we get a stamp. I think once we collected 30 of them we get a free meal. Last time we went the lady was so nice to give me 5 stamps at once. She probably figured I wouldn't manage to collect all 30 in the time I'd be here anyway :-)



Btw, the title of the card is one of the few things I can read :-)
It says: "Restaurant, Point Card".

While I'm uploading pictures... here are two more. I think autumn is the most beautiful season in Japan. The red and yellow colors everywhere are much more intense than the pale white and pink cherry blossoms. (Both pictures taken within AIST.)

Scientology

Someone posted a Scientology educational video link on youtube, and someone dugg it up. To quote a comment someone wrote about it: "I'm looking at this more objectively though. In my personal opinion Scientology is batshit crazy, [...]".

Web 3.43

You haven't heard of Web 2.0 yet? Someone decided to give the Internet a version number. However, as everything in the Internet, also it's current version number is moving fast.

A straightforward approach to compute the current version of the World Wide Web is to query Google 99 times to get the estimated total results for all versions ("Web 0.1" to "Web 9.9" in version increments of 0.1) and compute the weighted average. There is a Google Soap API to do that very conveniently, even from within Matlab. The only drawback is that the results using the API are not as accurate as those you get when using the interface for humans. Anyway, the number I got was 3.43.

Inspired by Userfriendly.org :-)

Osutori

In Japanese Austria and Australia basically sound identical. I usually have to mention that I am from Europe, and that there are no Kangaroos where I come from. Sometimes it also helps mentioning Vienna or Mozart :-)

Anyway, seems as though there is finally a solution to the problem. Austria's name in Japanese will be changed from Osutoria to its original form: Osutori. Dropping the last "a" will make it sound different from Osutoraria (which is Australia's Japanese name).

There is more information at ORF.at (German). And Matsusaka has also sent me the official document (PDF, German and Japanese). However, this seems to be somehow unofficial and some are objecting to this change... anyway, I think it's a great idea.

Playing Instruments Differently

Martin found this on the web:



What's next? :-)

Wearable Guitar

Australian researchers embedded sensors in the arms of a t-shirt to create a wearable musical instrument [...]

(Found at Boing Boing.)

Now all we need is wearable amplifiers! :-)

Small World

I love Google Earth! I just traveled around the world visiting places of which I have special memories. Can you guess the places? :-)









In case you are wondering what Tsukuba looks like, I've posted a Google Earth picture here.

Autumn

Tsukuba is a lovely place in autumn! Flowers everywhere (as in all seasons so far), colorful green/yellow/orange/red leaves, fresh air, and sunshine! Here is a picture I took on my way to work. I think this is my most favorite season :-)



If you are a last.fm user try snappradio. A wonderful idea by Paul. It makes the music twice as enjoyable! He automatically links images to the music you are listening too. Web 2.0 seems almost as good as autumn in Tsukuba! :-)

Fujisan is Back!

Mount Fuji has returned again! The summer haze is gone, and the cooler autumn weather has cleared the air. The last time I had seen Mount Fuji was my first morning at Ninomiya house. Since then I had only seen the haze. I had forgotten what a wonderful view it is :-)

23 Days

The graph shows the download statistics for my PhD thesis... a nice way to measure its decay. The dotted red line is a fitted exponential curve. The estimated half-life period is about 23 days, which is somehow comparable to the half-life of the rare cosmogenic isotope ³³P.



The outlier in June might be related to the discussions on the MIREX list. In October the MIREX results were published. In both cases I was often looking up things in my thesis, either to support arguments, or to create my posters.

Actually what I was really looking into was how easy it is to use processing to plot simple curves. The anti-aliasing is really nice... but I can do the same plot with 10 times less lines of code in Matlab and plus I get the axis for free...

MusicRainbow Demo

I finally finished the video for the MusicRainbow demo. It's only 3'20'' long but it took almost 5 years to make it (including at least 7 years waiting for the program to encode the different video formats). At least I learned a lot about codecs and which ones are not suitable for this kind of video. I'll post it to Information Aesthetics as suggested by Paul (thanks for the suggestion!) :-)

I built the interface with Processing. It's a wonderful tool to quickly develop ideas and one of the many great suggestions Masataka has given me in the last 7 months. Currently I'm working on another user interface using Processing... which I think will be much better, because it takes user preferences into account such as "I like this artist" and allows exploration within different dimensions... and first results seem great too :-)

BTW, Masataka is a master in creating demonstration videos. You might be interested in some of them. For example, in one of his demonstration videos he shows how we will scan through songs in the future (SmartMusicKIOSK). Another futuristic tool with nice videos is Musicream which can be used to generate playlists and explore music.

Yokohama

Yesterday Ninomiya house organized a bus trip to Yokohama China town and Zoorasia. I learned that Kangaroo means “I don’t know” in the Aborigine language. On his first visit to Australia Captain Cook was once again pointing at something and his hosts (who had gotten a bit tired of his fascination of their everyday environment) just said “I don’t know”. After that he wrote down in his book that the animals were called Kangaroos. I also learned that Orangutan means “people from the forest” in Malaysia.

Japanese Culture

I’m constantly learning…

So far I’ve often ordered more or less randomly from the menu in restaurants. I’ve learned not to do that anymore, because the person sitting on the next table was served a dish that was still moving. And the animal (I think it was an octopus or something like that) was not just moving a bit, but it was moving a lot! And it kept on moving for a long time. I need to remember what the Japanese word is for food that is still moving…

Another thing I learned is to wait until after lunch (or dinner) to ask for the names of foods (and only order food with names I know). Otherwise I might lose my appetite again… the dish was called “Parent and Child”. It was chicken with egg.

Gradually I’m also deepening my understanding of the cultural differences of the attitude towards work. Gwen told me that in Japan part-time jobs are called “arbeit”. (Which means “job” in German.) I guess a long time ago, when the first Austrians came to Japan and talked about their (full time) jobs back home, the Japanese understood that those are only part-time jobs.

The Beer Machine!

Check this out! Put your glass in the machine. Push the button. The machine tilts the glass, fills it about 2/3, stops, straightens it again, continues filling it, and adds the foam doing so! The glasses are filled until the rim, every time! I conducted a small test with myself as test person to see if it really gets it right all the time… and it did! :-)

Watch the video here.

CrestMuse & SIGMUS

On Thursday we had a CrestMuse project presentation in Osaka. (That’s the project I’m working on.) Several partners are involved who work on a wide range of very interesting projects related to music. Somehow they managed to get over 100 people to attend (and I was told that they didn’t do much advertisement). They even had to reject a large number of students because they ran out of seats in the lecture room.

The meeting took place on the 14th floor of a stylish skyscraper. I would have never guessed that we were actually in university offices. The location was great (right in the city center). The view of the city was great too. However, the strangest thing was that the university was sharing a building with a hotel (which looked really nice), and a fancy restaurant. (And probably a number of companies.) Masataka told me that he thinks “normal” students don’t study there, but he wasn’t sure what kind of students actually do.

View of Osaka from one of the rooms where the demonstrations were given.



The project presentation consisted of lots of demonstrations (including stuff I’ve been working on), some overview talks, and a panel discussion. I couldn’t understand the Japanese presentations, but the demonstrations were great, and the best part was to meet many colleagues I had already met in summer. I was also told that the main purpose of such meetings was to get drunk :-)

After going out for some drinks, I spent most of the remaining night writing slides and restructuring them for my invited talk for the next morning… The next day a SIGMUS meeting took place in the same rooms. SIGMUS is the Japanese special interest group for music. They have several meetings a year in different locations in Japan, the next one (which will be even bigger) is in December in Tokyo. I was impressed how large and how well organized the music research community is in Japan. It seems like a parallel world to the “international community”. Unfortunately many papers never get translated into English. The language barrier is definitely a problem… but the situation seems to be improving. Anyway, the demonstrations were great. Unfortunately, the schedule was very tight and there were lots of people… so I didn’t get to play with the demonstrations as much as I wanted to. I can’t wait until such music interfaces will be available to everyone :-)

This pictures was taken in one of the rooms were the demonstrations were given. There was music from all directions :-)



In the front of the next picture you can see Yoshii's Drumix demonstration. I really enjoyed playing with it! You can put any audio CD into the system, it automatically analyzes the bass and snare drum parts, lets you replace them with other samples, lets you change the rhythm patterns, ...
In the background you can see Hamanaka who also demonstrated his work at ISMIR. Unfortunately the speakers he used at ISMIR didn't make it possible to really understand what his demonstration was about. Anyway, I got another chance to try it out (with headphones) and it was really fun... it takes a bit to get used to how to control the system, but it's fun to play with. Standing in the middle of the demonstration room I could hear different music from all directions. Moving my hand towards my ear I could focus on the music coming from in front of me.



There were lots of other cool demonstrations which I don't have pictures of. I especially liked Ito's work on remixing a piece of music. It was fun to control the loudness of each individual instrument. I think it's a great way for untrained listeners to understand how each instrument contributes to the whole. Ito explaining his system:



I also liked the demonstration by Kitahara who found a clever way to compute similarity on the instrumentation level. I think his approach could help overcome limitations the techniques have which I'm currently working with.

Tommie's demonstration on the evaluation of singing skills was lots of fun, too. Unfortunately his system only gave me 30 out of 100 points... it thought I didn't get my pitch intervals right. I think he still needs to improve it.

There were many more interesting demonstrations. For example, Ohishi demonstrated a nice query-by-humming and speech interface, and Prof. Katayose's team also had a number of very interesting demonstrations which were fun to try out. I also had the opportunity to have interesting conversations with many people, including Keiji Hirata.

Random Pictures

I recently tried out Karate. Some of the Katas they showed us didn’t seem to have many fighting elements; instead they were all about balance, precision, and focus of energy. I really like it and I think I’ll start taking Karate lessons :-)



This picture shows the entrance to my cubicle. On the left side is Masataka’s cubicle, on the right side is mine.



This picture was taken at Akihabara station (in Tokyo). Somehow I find those ticket machines fascinating. (Especially when there are crowds of people and there is always some beeping going on.)



Here is a sketch I made thinking about a metaphor I could use in my invited talk in Osaka... at the end I decided not to. The idea was that there is lots of music out there, but we can only access a small part easily (the pieces which are hanging very low). Even if we had a ladder (like the Internet) to reach all of the music, it would still be difficult to make choices. In addition I wanted to add many more "music trees" to create a forest of music. If every tree could fit 1000 pieces I would have needed a forest with many thousands of trees (only to reflect the more than 3.5 million pieces available on iTunes) :-)

Victoria

Last week I was at a conference on music information retrieval in Victoria (Canada). It's an annual conference which takes place in a different country every year. I've been attending it since 2002 and it's by far my favorite conference (and the only one I'm attending this year). Next year the conference will be held in Vienna! :-)

I got to see lots of interesting demonstrations, heard interesting talks on the newest developments, and had a chance to talk to many people working on similar topics as I am. I learned a lot. It was a great week!

Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to do sightseeing. But anyway, here are two pictures I took of the sea. The water was actually quite warm! :-)
(Special thanks to Michael who recommended me to rent a bike and cycle to the beach!)





At the conference one of the things I was presenting was work I did together with Masataka. Here is an excerpt of the screenshot from the MusicRainbow. (I plan to put a demonstration online soon.)



MusicRainbow is a very simple interface to help find interesting artists in large music collections. I got lots of helpful feedback on the interface. Overall it seems that it is usable. (Special thanks to David for the advice on how to make it more obvious in which direction the rainbow is turning.)

Most of the time at the conference we spent listening to talks.



One night, some researchers spontaneously turned the conference room into a concert room :-)



Personally I enjoyed the poster presentations and demonstrations even more than the talks. This demonstration by Ajay was particularly unusual :-)
(Picture taken by Paul.)



And this is one of the "unofficial" demonstrations I really enjoyed. Here Paul is demonstrating his "search inside the music" system to Oscar (who also had some nice demonstrations to show). Another really nice demonstration was the work Peter and his colleagues have been working on (an enhanced 3-dimensional version of Islands of Music with a number of very cool features).



And most important of all were the discussions we had in the restaurants and bars every night :-)
(Picture taken by Paul.)



A strange thing I noticed (after coming back to Tsukuba) is that I was missing the Japanese food! Especially natto :-)

Almost 6 Months

I just got back from my first honeymoon. Gwen and I spent two wonderful weeks mainly in Tokyo and Kyoto area. Back in the office my todo list seems long enough to keep me occupied for the rest of the year, but my head is still full of wonderful memories.

Those memories include many friendly Japanese we met on our trip. A number of times when we were studying our maps, people approached us and asked if they could help. Once when we got lost in Kyoto we asked a lady in front of her home for directions. Although she hardly spoke English she understood which temple we were looking for and told us that we would need to hurry as the temple was about to close. She then decided to show us the way... and started running with her slippers. We were almost shocked. However, with our bicycles it wasn’t hard to follow her. She ran 2 blocks just to show us where we would need to make a turn! On other occasions people approached us to ask where we are from. Sometimes this resulted in interesting conversations, and once (in Tokyo) a friendly lady who had approached us even invited us to a wonderful Sushi dinner. (It was the best Sushi we ever had! Each piece was different and more delicious than the previous. The fish was so fresh that it was almost scary. We had our own cook and were sitting right in front of him!) Twice we also spent a day with volunteer guides. I wonder if Japan is the only place on earth where volunteer guides are happy to guide foreigners through their cities. And each time we forgot something, someone was so nice to run after us to bring it to us. In general we always felt very save.

Of course not all Japanese are so friendly. In particular we noticed some rather unfriendly shop keepers in very touristy areas, maybe because we didn’t look like people with lots of money. But overall, the friendliness we encountered was amazing.

From all the wonderful gardens, temples, castles, old streets and everything else we saw here is a list of some of my favorites (not sorted):

* I really enjoyed the stone gardens (maybe also known as Zen gardens). One of the more famous gardens we saw is the one in Ryoanji (Kyoto). In one of the guide books it says that stone gardens are not for viewing but for thinking. The gardens are very tidy (raked gravel), very simple, very different to European style gardens, and very inspiring.

* I was also very impressed by the garden hosted by the Entsuji temple. The garden is designed to be the frame for the view of the nearby mountain. This concept is called “borrowed view” (shakkei). The emperor who originally had the garden built searched 12 years for the perfect site. The mountain itself is not so special; it reminded me of Kahlenberg in Vienna. But it was the first time I saw a garden designed merely as a frame for something bigger far away. I guess it is kind of related to the stone gardens which are somehow a frame for one’s own thoughts.

* We went to a sumo tournament in Ryogoku (Tokyo). I usually don’t like watching sports too much but the sumo culture is very interesting. The sport is very closely linked to the Shinto religion (I think that’s the oldest religion in the world still practiced today). Shinto symbols and rituals dominate the tournament. I also realized that sumo is much more of a sport than I had originally thought. And it can be very brutal. And I was surprised to see that a number of very good sumo wrestlers do not have Japanese origins.

* Calligraphy is something I never really understood. Masataka was so nice to show Gwen and me a museum which contains the works of Mitsuo Aida. I’ve never seen so simple, yet powerful brush strokes. With only few brush strokes Mitsuo Aida expressed thoughts which can deeply touch one’s soul.

* There were also countless small things which I really enjoyed such as cycling through the narrow streets of Kyoto, taking a Japanese style bath, eating many things I’ve never seen before (most of which were very tasty), traveling in a Shinkansen train (bullet train), watching people, a wonderful sunset on the last evening in Tsukuba, cooling my feet in a cold river, bamboo forests, walking barefoot on beautiful wooden floors, new and shiny red bibs tied around ancient stone statues covered in moss, all those very old trees which Gwen pointed out, walking barefoot on moss, ...

Here are some pictures (the nicest ones were taken by Gwen):

This is an insect we have never seen before. Gwen thought it was very cute.



This plant was also new to us.



In this picture you can clearly see the mosquito cultivation ponds each temple’s garden has. Some say that mosquitos are messengers of the gods. Most temple gardens had plenty of them.



Most gardens also had huge spider webs. However, some say that spider webs are a symbol of the evil forces which try to prevent the gods from communicating with the humans. Thus, most temple gardeners remove spider webs when they see them.



And this is a picture of me fighting a swarm of god's messengers.



This picture shows a typical Japanese style bath (“sento”). The bathwater is never changed. Everyone uses the same water.



In this picture you can see the Tokyo statue of liberty.



This picture shows one of the famous capsule hotels. This capsule is located in Miraikan (Tokyo) and once the door is closed it is water proof for several thousand meters. The manual says you can fit up to three people in it, but I couldn’t see how.



This is the cheapest option of getting a good rest in Tokyo. Each wagon (subway and trains) has seats specially reserved for those who need them.



This is Tokyo’s skyline:



A tree covered in moss:



A bamboo forest (in the background):



A Japanese kindergarten transportation device:



Walking barefoot on moss:



Riding on the back of a big turtle:



Statues and bibs:



Sitting on a red carpet:



A Waldfee sitting on a tree in Nara:



Some of the places we visited were crowded with Japanese tourists. In the background of this picture you can see the doors of the temple which hosts the largest bronze statue of the world.