Alexander Refsum Jensenius

TEDxArendal 2024 

Can doing nothing tell us everything? Meet Professor Alexander Refsum Jensenius, a music researcher exploring the deep connections between sound, space, and the human body. Through his fascinating studies on stillness and motion, Alexander has discovered surprising insights into how we interact with our environment. 

Speaker Bio

Alexander Refsum Jensenius is a music researcher and research musician and works as Professor of music technology and Director of RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo. His research centres around relationships between sound, space, and the human body, specifically how and why people move to music. This knowledge he uses to create new music with untraditional instruments. He is widely published, including “Sound Actions”, “Sonic Design” and “A NIME Reader”. Alexander received a multi-disciplinary bachelor’s degree in music and mathematics and a master’s in musicology from the University of Oslo. He then completed a master’s in applied information technology at the Chalmers University of Technology before pursuing a PhD in music technology at the University of Oslo. He has been a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley (CNMAT), McGill University (IDMIL), and KTH (TMH). He was Head of the Department of Musicology from 2013-2016 and led the Steering Committee of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression from 2011-2022.