Organization
The Department of Musicology owns the fourMs Lab. Professor Alexander Refsum Jensenius serves as Director of the lab. Lab Engineer Kayla Burnim handles the daily operations. The Director reports to the IT/AV Council of the Department of Musicology. All active users attend monthly lab meetings. A booking system is in place to organize the activities and to prioritize between users.
Location
The fourMs Lab has since 2018 been physically located at RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion on the northwest side of the Blindern campus of the University of Oslo. The lab space consists of an entranceway, a control room, and the main lab area which acts as a flexible black box. In addition, comes storage space for additional equipment.
Staff
A 100% lab engineer has been working in the lab since January 2019. Her duties are split between maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure and performing data management for RITMO's project. Several research assistants help with the daily operation of research projects in the lab.
Users
The fourMs Lab is a national infrastructure and is open for researchers from all over Norway. Lab usage is based on a cost code (“leiestedsmodell”), which simplifies the process of giving external users access to the lab. For external users, it is mandatory to have support from the lab engineer to get access to the facility.
Internal users, including guest researchers, can get access to work alone in the lab, after a certification process. We are currently developing a formal lab training system. This will be an online course, including a combination of pre-recorded videos and text material. Once someone passes the final test of the course they can move on to hands-on training and final certification for using the lab on their own.