Mobile Sound

Sound, Mobile Media, Art & Culture

Archive for audio

Sonic Interaction Design Book launch

The MIT Press Sonic Interaction Design Book that comes out of the EU SID COST action I was involved with and curated an exhibition for, has its launch event and symposium in May at ETH in Zurich. The Book is edited by edited by Karmen Franinović and Stefania Serafin.

Here’s the blurb from the MIT website:

Sound is an integral part of every user experience but a neglected medium in design disciplines. Design of an artifact’s sonic qualities is often limited to the shaping of functional, representational, and signaling roles of sound. The interdisciplinary field of sonic interaction design (SID) challenges these prevalent approaches by considering sound as an active medium that can enable novel sensory and social experiences through interactive technologies. This book offers an overview of the emerging SID research, discussing theories, methods, and practices, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience.

Sonic Interaction Design gathers contributions from scholars, artists, and designers working at the intersections of fields ranging from electronic music to cognitive science. They offer both theoretical considerations of key themes and case studies of products and systems created for such contexts as mobile music, sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and gaming. The goal is not only to extend the existing research and pedagogical approaches to SID but also to foster domains of practice for sound designers, architects, interaction designers, media artists, product designers, and urban planners. Taken together, the chapters provide a foundation for a still-emerging field, affording a new generation of designers a fresh perspective on interactive sound as a situated and multisensory experience.

Contributors:
Federico Avanzini, Gerold Baier, Stephen Barrass, Olivier Bau, Karin Bijsterveld, Roberto Bresin, Stephen Brewster, Jeremy Coopersotck, Amalia De Gotzen, Stefano Delle Monache, Cumhur Erkut, George Essl, Karmen Franinović, Bruno L. Giordano, Antti Jylhä, Thomas Hermann, Daniel Hug, Johan Kildal, Stefan Krebs, Anatole Lecuyer, Wendy Mackay, David Merrill, Roderick Murray-Smith, Sile O’Modhrain, Pietro Polotti, Hayes Raffle, Michal Rinott, Davide Rocchesso, Antonio Rodà, Christopher Salter, Zack Settel, Stefania Serafin, Simone Spagnol, Jean Sreng, Patrick Susini, Atau Tanaka, Yon Visell, Mike Wezniewski, John Williamson

Apply now: PhD Studentship ‘Notating Digital Sound: Designing or Composing for Mobile Media’. Supervisors: Dr Thor Magnusson, Dr Frauke Behrendt, Prof. Jonathan Woodham (by 11th April 2013)

Applications are invited for a PhD Studentship ‘Notating Digital Sound: Designing or Composing for Mobile Media’ (valued at £58,500) at the University of Brighton, supervised by Dr Thor Magnusson, Dr Frauke Behrendt and Prof. Jonathan Woodham.
The application deadline is 4pm, 11th April 2013.
The context of music production and dissemination has drastically changed with digital media and mobile computing devices. Interactivity and screens have become an essential part of how sound is represented and controlled, and creative algorithms are used to analyse or generate sonic patterns.
We seek proposals for a PhD project that will engage with interface and interaction design in digital sonic interfaces. The ideal research proposal would intersect areas of digital sound, human-computer interaction, graphic design, data representation, and software/media studies. Of particular interest are Read the rest of this entry »

The sound of locative media: out now

My journal article The sound of locative media has now been published by Convergence.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this article! The full reference is: Frauke Behrendt (2012) The sound of locative media, Convergence 18 (3): 283-295.


Screenshot from the video of The National Mall app

One of the case studies I discuss in the article is ‘The National Mall’, an iPhone app (released in 2011 by musicians Bluebrain) where users listen to specific music depending on their location.

Here’s the abstract:

This article develops an alternative perspective to the visual bias in locative media discourses by focusing on the role of sound in locative media and related discussions. This sonic perspective allows us to understand the temporal, situated and embodied aspects of locative media. Informed by debates from sound studies and mobile media studies, a locative smart phone application where users experience specific sounds depending on their locations, is discussed. The concept of ‘Placed Sounds’ is introduced for a more detailed analysis of locative sound experiences. A framework for analysis is developed to discuss how locative sound engages with the auditory aspects of our spatial perception, how immersion operates for locative media and sound, and also to consider the role of situated experience, the role of walking as remixing, and how agency and exclusion operate in locative sound. This framework explains how walking operates in terms of interacting with locative media, and how we experience being immersed in physical and media contexts at once via sound.

You can get the full article here.

See you in Copenhagen next week? Talk at Reconfiguring Radio PhD Summer School

I’ll be in Copenhagen next week at the ‘Reconfiguring Radio‘ PhD Summer School, organised by the LARM Audio Research Archive and The PhD Programme in Cultural Studies, Literature and the Arts at the University of Copenhagen. The session on ‘Radio, Mobility and Artistic Practices’ is on Friday 8th July.

Hope to see some of you there – let me know if you are around!

The session includes:

9.00 Keynote: Frauke Behrendt

– Beyond Mobile Listening: Engaging with Phones, Sounds and Art

10.00 Paper presentation

Photos of Sounds Like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event

Photos from Sounds Like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event that took place at The Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) Research Institute, Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge) on 17th May 2011, organised by Frauke Behrendt, are now online (photos by Ann Evelin Lawford) and some by myself are here and there are more by Julio D’Escrivan. Please let us know if you also have pictures form the event to share!

A big thank you to all speakers, performers and chairs – Georgina Born, Atau Tanaka, John Williamson, Steve Symons, Julio D’Escrivan, Rachel O’ Dwyer, Lalya Gaye, Enrique Tomas, Adam Parkinson, Richard Hoadley, Ashley Elsdon, Nick Bryan-Kinns – for making this a great event!

Call: Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event’ on 17th May 2011 at CoDE, Cambridge

I’m organising ‘Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event’ on Tuesday 17th May 2011 at CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. It would be great if YOU as one of my blog readers might be interested to submit your work and/or attend the event!

Please find more information below and on the website www.anglia.ac.uk/soundslikemobility

I look forward to hearing back from you! It would also be great if you could circulate this email widely. Thank you!

Sounds like Mobility: A Mobile Media, Sound and Music Event

Tuesday 17th May 2011, CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Sitting down motionless, staring at screens, and focusing on the task at hand are becoming much less common than using media on the go, touching and listening to a device, while also being involved in other activities. In mobile media contexts, alternative sensory modalities increasingly replace the largely visual paradigms of the (both physical and virtual) desktop era. This one-day event examines the role of sound in media interactions as an especially pertinent example of our post-desktop world. It features invited speakers, performances, demos, pecha-kuscha-style short presentations and poster presentations. It takes place in Cambridge (UK) and is organised by CoDE: The Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University.

There is much more to this than iPods and alert sounds. Interactions between various physical contexts, social networks, mobile bodies and networked devices can be mediated in an almost infinite number of ways by sound – and also Read the rest of this entry »

PhD course ‘Multimodal interaction in virtual environments’ incl visual-haptic-audio feedback, sensing technologies, capacitive sensing & optical motion capture

My ‘Sonic Interaction Design‘ colleague Professor Serafin is organising a PhD course on ‘Multimodal interaction in virtual environments’. The course will “start with an overview of multimodal perception to explain how humans behave in virtual environments where incomplete and impoverished sensory cues are reproduced.” And, amongst many other things the course will also “present an overview of technologies for visual-haptic-audio feedback in virtual environments, together with sensing technologies based on capacitive sensing and optical motion capture.”

For more information and for signing-up check here. The course is on May 10, 11, 12, 13 and June 6th at Aalborg University Copenhagen (where they also have the interesting Medialogy degrees). There is no fee for the course, but you get 4 ECTS.

Call for Papers: A Sonic Geography: Rethinking Auditory Spatial Practice

The new ‘Interference: a Journal Of Audio Culture‘ just issued a very interesting call for papers for their second issue (wrote about the launch here). They are looking for contribution discussing ‘Sonic Geography: Rethinking Auditory Spatial Practice’.

This is the full call:

There now exists a significant body of work exploring the confluence of spatial and sonic practices, with recent literature acknowledging the role of sound in the ongoing production, regulation and conceptual representation of space. Aural architecture, soundscaping and sonic sculpture abound, as do accounts of sonic strategies for the delineation of territory, the performance of identity, and the management of difference within physical, and more recently, mobile, virtual, and networked spaces.

Events in the mainstream art world that took place in 2010,  such as the inclusion of John Wynne’s untitled sound sculpture for 300 speakers, Pianola, and vacuum cleaner in the Newspeak: British Art Now exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, and Susan Philipsz’ reception of the Turner prize for her public sonic intervention ‘Lowlands’, demonstrate that this field of sound-based, spatially distributed practice has reached Read the rest of this entry »

1 week to deadline – please submit now for Sonic Interaction Design Exhibition!

I’m calling all practitioners who read my blog to submit their relevant work to the new exhibition on Sonic Interaction Design that I’m involved with. The deadline is next Friday – 5th November 2010! The event will take place at the Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology & Medicine in Oslo in Summer 2011, in collaboration with NIME 2011 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). All relevant information is at http://www.cost-sid.org/wiki/SIDExhibitionSummer2011 and in an older post.

Sound Pairs, Music adjusting to your jogging pace, Sonified Social Networks and more at Haptic Audio Interaction Design 2010

Last week I attended part of the Haptic Audio Interaction Design 2010 (HAID) workshop

http://media.aau.dk/haid10/ and these are some of the interesting projects and papers I experienced:

A Master’s student project (please send me her name if you know it  – I lost her card!) that impressed me was this set of memory games: ‘tactile pairs’ and ‘sound pairs’ where you play this traditionally visual game with a focus on touch or sound.

D-Jogger: a multimodal music interface for music selection based on user step frequency by Read the rest of this entry »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.