Henrik Frisk

Musician, composer and researcher

Blog

2026

Article on artistic research

In debates where artistic research is discussed, it is often regarded as a common field, or in some cases, even a subject. This is not surprising; this is ho...

Who is archiving what, where and when?

What is data and what is an archive of data? What kind of information does a piece of artistic research data contain and who is equipped to decipher it? I do...

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2025

Automatic audio classification

A PhD student at KTH that I am supervising did as his master's project an annotated human database with a thousand samples. A number of composers and resea...

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2024

Paper in Journal of Sonic Studies

This paper departs from ideas developed in the artistic research project Goodbye Intuition (GI). The focus of GI was on improvising with ‘creative’ machines....

New piece for the historic studio at EMS

I'm currently Working on a 7-limit scale to complement the original pitches I started working on for the piece. This is constructed as a harmonic space1 in ...

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2022

Vector hack

A biennial international festival devoted to experimental analog vector graphics

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2020

Networked performance

The idea of being able to perform at a distant in real time, together with musicians scattered around the world, is not new. It is probably more affordable a...

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2019

This blog is still alive

After some time of inactivity I will resurrect this blog. It will still have a focus on the artistic research in music I do at the Royal College of Music in ...

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2016

Subtraction

Part of the music for a sound installation at the Dome of Visions in Stockholm together with artist Ebba Bohlin. This music is very soft….

Music for trees

Currently working on a very interesting project with visual artist Ebba Bohlin. We are doing an installation at the Dome of Visions at KTH on trees: the slee...

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2015

PhD dissertation ready for download.

After many months of work, my PdH dissertation Improvisation, Computers, and Interaction : Rethinking Human-Computer Interaction Through Music (ISSN 1653-861...

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2014

Repetition Repeats all other Repetitions

Recording of Repetition Repeats all other Repetitions done at EMS in Stockholm in January 2011. Stefan Östersjö plays the 10-stringed guitar. This version i...

Concepts in artistic research

The philosophy of concepts is intimately tied to cognitive sciences and is a large field of study. In this short post I am only scratching the surface of it ...

Shopenhauer

In the essay On Authorship and Style Shopenhauer writes: A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author’s thoughts. The destilling of id...

On methods by Arlander

Reading ‘On methods of artistic research’ by Anette Arlander in the recent yearbook of artistic research from the Swedish Research Council. It is a overview ...

Artistic research ethics

Research ethics is a big topic, but in general, ethics are not widely discussed in our field. Not only being a young discipline but also one which departs fr...

Creative writing in research

We have seen the topic of writing (essays, creative writing, academic writing) popping up quite often in the field of artistic research. It may come as no su...

From teaching skill to performing art

Is it possible to move away from a highly specialized and skill driven methodology to a more indeterminate and elusive approach without loosing the craft? I...

What is art?

What is art? Why is it we do not know that for sure? The problem with not knowing what art is or what its boundaries are is that we will have difficulties tr...

Artistic economy

Listening to Lady Gaga’s album Artpop (unfortunately a commercial failure) makes me think about the craft of studio work an composing involved in an ablum su...

Transatlantic Conversations

Maggi Olin and Christine Jensens group Transatlantic Conversations in a live radio broadcast from Malmö, Sweden on December 5, 2013. www.sr....

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2013

Artistic research: results

One of the main debates ever since the introduction of artistic research, or practice based research, is how the results should be communicated. I.e. in what...

Adam Smith and culture

The political economy of Adam Smith is often seen as the birth of capitalism, and economist’s like Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, advisor to Ronald Reag...

Sound, video and symbols

Working on our new film, Anders Elberling and I talk a lot about the impact of sound on vision. What is audiovisual interaction? What is synchronicity? Our m...

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2012

European Saxophone Ensemble

In a EC funded project French saxophonist Guillaume Orti will select twelve members for a European saxophone ensemble. If you are interested vist www.europea...

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2011

Freedom and individuality

When discussing improvisation and freedom one argument that is frequently made is that people like Ornette Coleman and Derek Bailey are not as free as they a...

About ‘finding your own sound’.

A central concept in jazz improvisation is the development of a personal sound. What are the relations between the known and the unknown, between the conscio...

Audience interaction

Every improvising musician knows how the audience can influence a performance and what a difference it makes when things ‘are right’. What is it that the aud...

Improvisation and identity

In jazz improvisation the notion of creating ‘your own’ expression is very important. Individuality in sound, phrasing, articulation and rhythm is held in hi...

Saxophone/laptop improvisation in Spain

Here’s a video excerpt from a performance i did in Spain in early 2010. The concert took place in gallery Xavier Fiol in downtown Palma at the opening of my ...

The Mystic Writing Pad

This is the first of a series of pieces under the title of The Mystic Writing Pad. Eventually this will be one section in a longer work for the digital ensem...

Henrik Frisk’s Ooko at GMC, 2010

This is a recording from a gig we did with my band Ooko at Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm on December 1, 2010. This is the standard Like Someone in Love. Mo...

On artistic research

The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, to which I have contributed the chapter ‘Time and Interaction: research through non-visual arts and media’, ...

(Re)Thinking Improvisation

(Re)Thinking Improvisation is the name of a research project at the Malmö Academy of Music, funded by the Swedish Research Council that I’m a part of. The p...

fetchmail and Exchange 2007

Lund University upgraded their email server to Exchange 2007 which suddenly made it impossible to fetch my email over IMAP via fetchmail using my old setting...

Writing microtonal music in Lilypond

In the process of writing a second (and possibly a third) part to The Mystic Writing Pad I’ve been trying to figure out a way that allows me to improvise on ...

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2010

Plugged Nickel 1969

I just got my hands on a recording with the ‘lost’ Miles Davis Quintet (with Wayne Shorter (ss, ts), Chick Corea (el-p), Dave Holland (b, el-b), Jack DeJohne...

Henrik Frisk’s Ooko

This is a recording we did with my band Ooko in Malmö early on February 15, 2009. Some free impro and some tunes, some acoustic and some electronic. The ver...

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2009

Soap operas

Browsing the web for Soap Opera content for our Sucktion performance I came across this particularly funny clip: What strikes me about this passage is how i...

Vacuum cleaner performance

I started looking at different ways in which the soprano can ‘perform’ on the vacuum cleaner in Anne LeBaron’s Opera Sucktion. One option would be to let Mar...

Sucktion: laying out the files

Having spent the last few days familiarizing myself with the sound and MIDI-files for Anne LeBarons Cyber opera Sucktion I’m now starting to get an idea of w...

Sucktion: A Cyborgopera by Anne LeBaron

On November 13 I will perform in a staging of Anne LeBaron’s Cyborgopera Sucktion. I will perform the laptop part which, interestingly enough, is written add...

timbreMap program testing

The timbreMap program is part of PhD project and is designed to organize timbral features of its audio input in its 2D output space. It uses the JetNet imple...

Fedora, MacBook Pro, and internal sound

Since I received my brand new MacBook Pro (17’’) I haven’t figured out how to get sound routed to the internal speakers using PulseAudio. The headphone outle...

Back after months of inactivity

I experienced a bit of a void after my PhD dissertation/defense about a year ago, so bad that I had no interest in posting on this blog. Well, I’m back now, ...

Bergson and consciousness

Bergson, in Matter and Memory, defines two distinct conditions of existence; presentation to consciousness and logical or causal connection. Could it be that...

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2008

Choosing framework for my dissertation

Though my dissertation was just moved from May to September, I neww desperately to decide on the framework for which the material will be presented in. I wan...

Dissertation framework

After some more research on embeddable databases and offline RIA and offline AJAX (or LAJAX as some refer to it - see http://blogs.sun.com/FrancoisOrsini/ent...

OSX and NFS issues

When I need access to network services on my computers in my home/studio network, I usually set them up on GNUlinux and grant the other operating systems acc...

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2007

Seminar Dec. 11

[Edited and updated on Dec 19] Yesterday I defended a part of my dissertation (at what is here called a 75% seminar). The opponent was British composer and a...

etherSound - performance at ICMC 2008

This is a performance of my interactive improvisation environment etherSound (read the programme note) at ICMC 2008 in Copenhagen. The performance took place...

The Six Tones

Get the Flash Player to see this player. var s1 = new SWFObject(‘http://www.henrikfrisk.com/script/flvplayer.swf’,’single’,’320’,’240’,’7’); s1.addParam(‘all...

Setting up filesharing between OSX and FC5

Now, this is somewhat unrelated to this blog, but I’ll put it here anyways - mainly because I need to make notes about how I did it… I need to be able to acc...

Jaron Lanier

While reading Interface Culture - How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate. by Steven Johnson Johnson, 1997, I came across the name Ja...

Eco and semiology

… how information and redundancy appear at different levels under mutual influence. Eco, 1971, p. 140…

Composition and juxtaposition. Studies.

Find the notes for the introduction to the seminar on ‘Repetition Repeats all other Repetitions - a version for ‘Symphonie Diagonale’ by Viking Eggeling’ her...

ICMC 2007 in Copenhagen

The ICMC in 2007 will be held in Copenhagen this year. As somebody who works extensively with computers and improvisation (in combination that is) I am one o...

Dissertation getting closer…

Thoughts about the final stages of the planning of the disposition of my PhD project, Interactive Systems in Improvisation and Composition….

Migrating to java 1.5 - update

Going home after having written this I realized what was the problem. In essence it is the difference between all free software and almost all free software....

Migrating to java 1.5

I have spent the entire day fixing up my Java code in my timbreMap project. Not only am I moving to Linux (from OpenDarwin) but I’m also updating to Java 1.5...

The particular and the general

In an article by Rose Rosengarden Subotnik, 1978 the author writes about the history of the separation of music from language: ‘Music […] separated itself fr...

A Work In Progress

Following this link, you can download an article I’ve written that will soon be published in The Dutch Journal of Music Theory (there’s actually an RSS feed ...

timbreMap - re-writing the analysis code.

I have just started a complete re-write of the spectral analysis part of my main programming project - the timbreMap. After having optimized the DFT calculat...

New year!

Last year I wasn’t very active writing on this blog. When I wasn’t travelling (which I did a lot of) my two sons took up most of my time. No time for bloggin...

Hanoi Concert October 2006

This is a video recording of the first performance of my piece The Six Tones written in close collaboration with the two Vietnamese master musicians Than Thu...

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2006

Saxophone and computer

In January I did three solo saxophone & laptop concerts in Sweden. The following two track are from the concert at Artisten in Gothenburg on January 13. ...

Concert at CRMA, Stanford

On April 9 I played a concert together with Per Anders Nilsson at CRMA at Stanford, Palo Alto in California, US. This was the last concert in a series of six...

Repetition Repeats all other Repetitions

This is the version that Stefan premiered at the opening concert of the MusicAcoustica 2006 festival in Beijing on October 23. This recording however was mad...

Open form for ‘Repetition repeats…’

As was mentioned in this post the form for ‘Repetition repeats all other repetitions’ is open in the sense that a the piece can be played in a number of diff...

Tape part for guitar piece

I’m currently working on a piece for guitar and computer entitled ‘Repetition repeats all other repetitions’. The piece is for my friend and collegue Stefan ...

DTPA 2006, Doncaster, UK (2)

On the third day (my second day…) of the conference Sama’a Al Hashimi, a researcher and PhD candidate at Middlesex University, did a presentation of her work...

DTPA 2006, Doncaster, UK

An interesting conference on digital technology and performance arts with many interesting people. Me and Stefan Östersjö did a presentation of our paper ‘Ne...

Music and semiology

…il faut se placer de prime abord sur le terrain de la langue et la prendre pour norme de toutes les autres manifestations du langage. [de Saussure] I have ...

Schaeffer, Husserl and sound.

Since my PhD project is investigating sound and timbre as a means of interaction, phonomenology in general is of great interest to me. When reading Husserl’s...

Back after long break.

I’m back after a long period of inactivity in this diary. Mainly, it has been due to the birth of our second son in November of last year. Bruno is now 5 mon...

Time and rhythm and popular music.

At a concert in Reykjavik, Iceland on June 5 where Henrik Frendin and myself presented a program of electroacoustic music for electric viola and live electro...

The occidental head - body and brain.

In a recent meeting with professor Luca Francesconi, Kent Olofsson and my PhD collegue Stefan Östersjö as we were discussing an upcoming project, Luca ponder...

Working with score layout in SVG

I’m using Lilypond as my music typesetting software since a year. It works great for standard notation but has some limitations when it comes to graphical no...

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2005

Memory and perception

I am spending most of my time programming these days working on a piece of software that will allow me to investigate different models of ANN and their use f...

Timbre analysis

Today I finally had a chance to watch a decent display of the data outputted by my implementation of a critical band filter convolved with a amplitude spectr...

PortAudio library

After a long puase, I have now resumed working on my programming project to implement and test a speaker independent speach recognition algorithm suggested b...

Dissertation - form and content

The format of a dissertation in an artistic PhD is not be self evident. During the little over two years that I have worked on my project I have followed man...

Struggle

I’m making very slow progress on the Harp piece - not because I don’t know how to proceed but because so many other things are taking time away from composin...

Composing…

I’m spending all of my time working on the commission for a harp and computer piece. In the process I am also making the move away from using Finale for nota...

KnowledgeLab Berlin, June 2005

In June 2005 I took part in an event called Knowledge Lab staged by art historian Sarat Maharaj, singer Liu Sola, dancer Kofi Koko and the House of World Cul...

Thoughts about idiomatic writing for harp.

While going through the first sketches for my harp and computer piece with the harpist yesterday I started thinking about the relation between the compositio...

Back again…

After a long and well needed summer brake, and a remake of my studio, I am now slowly returning to work. I have had lots of time to think, and spent some tim...

Improvising with computer

When improvising on saxophone with live electronics - a computer - one of the things I am interested in is what can be described as the distorted mirror refl...

Barthes and semiology

Barthes writes: “We know that lingusits refuse the status of language to all communication by analogy - from the ‘language’ of bees to the ‘language’ of gest...

Improvisation, body and mind.

Finally getting a chance to write some again. I have been too busy travelling and playing concerts lately. I should try to get a more well balanced schedule…...

MIDAS workshop in Glasgow

I spent the weekend in Glasgow in Scotland doing a presentation of etherSound. After having worked on this piece for more than two years I think I have final...

Footpedal…

When I perform saxophone and computer improvisations I can usually get most of the parameters that I want to control in the synthesis from my saxophone audio...

Real-time generation of musical material

In the saxophone quartet Persipicio I use real time analysis of what the saxophones play to generate and manipulate musical material and sounds. When I compo...

California - travel log (2)

At UC Santa Barbara the department for research in the field of electronic art is called CREATE. Author of the great book ‘Microsound’ Curtis Roads is Associ...

Perspicio - score following in Max/MSP

Two years ago Stockholm Saxophone Quartet premiered my piece Persicio for saxophone quartet and computer. I am very glad to have a second performance of it i...

California - travel log

I have just spent two weeks in California, playing concerts and meeting musicians and composers. I visited four computer music departments at four universiti...

Max implementation of qlist

After having problems with the adaption for Max of Miller Puckette’s qlist object I finally decided to implement the basic idea of qlist in an abstraction us...

In preparation… (2)

(continuation from In preparation for a seminar… If the connection between input and output is too obvious the result is predictable and, while it may still ...

Sound installations - notes

For some time, I have been looking for references for relating my sound installation etherSound, and my planned project bioSound, to what has been done and w...

Artistic research and writing papers.

As I have now started to write papers more actively the subject of artistic research and what that really constitutes becomes an issue. Should I write in an ...

More on etherSound

Finished the paper on etherSound a few days ago. The biggest problem ended up being that I had to transfer the whole article to Word format whcih is a major ...

Next article…

Just as I finished the paper co-written with Miya Yoshida, I have to start editing and touching up my own article on etherSound. It is not easy to shift pers...

Paper on etherSound

Today myself and Miya Yoshida finished our paper on etherSound in the context of The Invisible Landscapes. Hopefully we will get it published, and I will soo...

Real-time versus non real-time

I should have realized that, in starting to re-work etherSound, I would end up changing almost everything. Since the new version is multi timbral, i.e. it wi...

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2004

More on etherSound

In my November 18 post, I mentioned the need for limiting the number of messages that would play back simultaneously. I think the way to solve this is to hav...

etherSound

Reworking etherSound - the article as well as the program….

The structures for improvisation

Again I have not been posting anything for a long time due to my spending most of my time with my son. I have however played a few concerts, amongst them wit...

Gothenburg seminar

I participated in the ArtTech Sublime seminar yesterday arranged by the schools of performing arts at the Gothenburg University (follow this link for more i...

Rhythms (2)

More on the workings of a composition for Harp and computer…

Rhythms

I have not been posting for some time which is the result of not having had so much time for my work recently (I have been spending most of it together with ...

Microsound

About the book microsound by Curtis Roads….

Xenakis

Note on Formalized Music by Iannis Xenakis….

What is improvisation?

I have frequently used the term improvisation without being very clear about what I mean. Obviously, improvisation can take on many different meanings. I wil...

Writing for Harp

First notes on the composing of a piece for harp and computer….

Harp piece

Thoughts on sound preparation….

Why computer?

The combined efforts of the performer and the computer becomes a combination of the static formalism of the score and the structured improvisation within one...

Set theory

What is the dichotomy of the problem of attempting to integrate acoustical instruments played live with computer based instruments on several levels?…

Method

What would be the best format to present my artistic process? Can it be described in text, that is, can it be removed from, in my case, the music? I think no...

Improvisation & interpretation

A few things relating to the difference between the performance of composed music and the act of musical improvisation. …

Free (?) Improvisation 2

When improvising, what is it I want to be free from? On what conditions do I feel free to express myself unrestricted? What is freedom in improvisation?…

bioSound project

As a follow-up to etherSound I have been planning to do a similar project titled bioSound. The point of etherSound was to collect information about what mess...

Aim

What is my subjective aim that proposes need for rethinking the problem?…

Music download help and legal stuff

You can listen to the music either as streaming audio (if you have the required bandwidth) or you can download the entire file and listen to it off line. The...

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