A generic introduction to RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, a Norwegian Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo. One deck that scales from a three-minute pitch to a thirty-minute talk, built with reveal.js and styled in the colours of the RITMO emblem, with RITMO's own pictograms. The emblem on the first and last slides comes alive: now and then one of its parts shakes, turns, slides or hops (not for viewers who prefer reduced motion, and not in print).
You can view the presentation here, or open index.html from a local copy of this repository.
The deck is organised in two directions. The questions are laid out horizontally, and their slides hang below them, with more detail further down. The duration is set by how far down you go.
Go one down per question for a three-minute presentation, two or three down for ten minutes, and all the way down for thirty to forty minutes.
Navigate with → between questions and ↓ downwards, or use space to walk through everything. Esc gives an overview of all the slides, S the speaker view with notes, and D switches between light and dark modes.
Eight questions, each opening on a full-bleed page in one of the three colours of the RITMO mark:
- Why? Rhythm everywhere, the vision, rhythm as a structuring mechanism, the link
- What? What we study, summarised from the annual reports: rhythm in music and dance, in the brain, between people, and in machines and cells, each with research questions; the original research priorities
- How? The four clusters that organise the work and their fuzzy borders, three departments around one phenomenon, ways of working, methods, shared laboratories, interdisciplinarity
- Who? The people, the people named in the annual reports by category, the world at RITMO, from recruitment to alumni, career development
- Where? A building designed for meeting, the coffee machine, the code of conduct, everyday life
- When? The timeline, a year of RITMO, results, legacy
- Learned? Lessons from ten years
- Join? How to follow our work
The slide under the opening slide embeds RITMO's film En verden full av rytmer from YouTube, so it needs an internet connection. Press → from the opening slide to skip it.
index.html?venue=Oslo&date=9 October 2026 adds the occasion to the title slide.
Every number on the slides comes from js/numbers.js, generated by tools/make_numbers.py from the analyses behind RITMO's final report. Only public-facing figures are used: publications registered in NVA, doctoral defences in the public registers, enrolment on the open online courses, staff, gender balance and countries from the annual reports, and counts from the public events archives. tools/make_figures.py draws the year's rhythm, the fuzzy clusters, the coffee machine and the staff chart, and copies three photographs from the 2025 annual report (the other photographs were added by hand: from RITMO's photo archive, EEG and eye tracking, VR and interactive music, the cell studies, the centre directors and the Dr. Squiggles robots; from the published annual reports, the common area, the coffee machine, a dog, the excursions, the winter retreat, the relay, RITMO Largo 2018, the Copenhagen retreat, the concert experiments in Stavanger and with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, and SysMus 2025) and the map of the countries RITMO's people come from; tools/trim_images.py trims the margins of graphics taken from earlier RITMO slides. The pictograms in images/pictograms/ and the emblem in logo/ are RITMO's originals; js/emblem.js animates the emblem.
To update, with paths to the RITMO source material set in the environment:
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r tools/requirements.txt
RITMO_REPORT=… RITMO_AR=… RITMO_TIMELINE=… .venv/bin/python tools/make_numbers.py
RITMO_REPORT=… RITMO_AR=… RITMO_TIMELINE=… .venv/bin/python tools/make_figures.py
.venv/bin/python tools/trim_images.py images/timeline.png
.venv/bin/python tools/build_pdf.py # writes ritmo.pdf
.venv/bin/python tools/build_pdf.py --venue Oslo --date "9 October 2026"
The script serves the deck locally and screenshots each slide with headless Chrome.
Photographs, pictograms, the emblem and graphics: University of Oslo and RITMO; the banner photograph on the first Why? slide is from Colourbox, as used in RITMO's 2018 annual report. The University of Oslo logo and the Research Council of Norway's "supported by" logo appear on the front slide. The deck is modelled on the MishMash presentation.
The code and text are under the MIT licence (see LICENSE). The photographs, logos and figures are not covered by it; they belong to RITMO, the University of Oslo and the photographers.