Mobile Sound

Sound, Mobile Media, Art & Culture

Archive for conference

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

‘Bridging Sound’ event at the University of Sussex, 23-24 November

The ‘Bridging Sound’ event is of interest to the mobile sound community as it “launches an interdisciplinary research forum dealing with 21st century soundscapes and auditory environments, which have become an exciting focus for artistic, technological, and sociological research.” The focus on bridges puts mobility at the heart this sound studies event, as we tend to encounter bridges while in motion, and many artistic projects in the area have also explored our mobile interactions with bridges. It’s organised by Professor Sally-Jane Norman and Dr Michael Bull.

The event info continues:

“Our urban surroundings and the sites we frequent for work, leisure, consumption and transportation offer scaffolds for new kinds of acoustic architectures. Sonic designs employ and mix platforms ranging from public address systems to intimate messaging. Roles of artists, urban planners, commercial stakeholders, state authorities, and “local bodies” are mobilised by the steadily expanding, yet never-quite-real estate inhabited by sound. Bridging Sound promotes and debates this burgeoning area of contemporary practice. It convenes practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplines to investigate figuratively, metaphorically and theoretically the intersections between sound, architecture and culture.”

The event runs 23-24 November, and I’ll be chairing a session on the Saturday – so would be great to see some of you then!

Here is the program from their website:

A two day event consisting of an internal workshop on Friday followed at 4pm by a series of public lectures and presentations which continue all day Saturday.

Friday 23rd November

10:00-15:30: Internal Workshop (post-graduate students and staff)

Oeyvind Brandstegg, Will Schrimshaw, Rupert Cox/Angus Carlyle

16:00-18:00: Public Lectures followed by discussions

Salome Voegelin, Will Schrimshaw

Saturday 24th November

9:30-17:00: Public Symposium introduced by Michael Bull, Sally-Jane Norman

Presentations:

Oeyvind Brandstegg

Michael Bull

Rupert Cox/Angus Carlyle

Sally-Jane Norman

Bridges Panel chaired by Frauke Behrendt (Brighton University)

School of Media, Film and Music:

Caroline Basset

Mel Friend

Tim Hopkins

Monika Metykova

School of History, Art History and Philosophy:

Ben Burbridge

Synthesis, Future Bridges

Registration appreciated by mail to M.J.Knight@sussex.ac.uk.

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 »

Symposium – Net Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks

Adriana de Souza e Silva and her colleagues at the Centre for Network Culture are organising an interesting event on ‘Net-Cultures: Mobility and Location in Social Networks’ on the 29th of April 2011.

The program can be found here and includes a keynote by Mimi Sheller on Mobile Art – Locating Mobile Network Cultures. Let me know if anyone is going, I might be tempted…

This is more information from their website:

The symposium will address topics, such as:

  • Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
  • New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
  • Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to location-based social networks;
  • Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / performance design;
  • Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
  • Learning and education Read the rest of this entry »

Extended deadline (March 4th) Audio-visuality conference, especially ‘Mobile Mediated Audiovisuality’ theme

The call for papers for the Audio-visuality conference has been extended to March 4th, 2011! It’s very likely that I will be at the event and it would be great to see many of you there!
The organisers are especially aiming to get more proposals focussing on the problems addressed in the 4 tracks (themes). Especially, they would like to have more proposals for theme ‘Mobile Mediated Audiovisuality’ (track 4)!  But submissions for the other tracks are also still welcome.
The proposals that they have already received will be taken into account together with the extra ones they will receive by March 4th.

Call: ‘Mobile Mediated Audiovisuality’ at conference on ‘Audiovisuality: the experience of audio-visual art, artefacts, and media texts’ in Denmark, May 2011

My colleague Ansa is  calling for contributions to the conference ‘on the experience of audio-visual art, artefacts, and media texts’ and one of their tracks is on ‘Mobile Mediated Audiovisuality’. The other tracks are ‘Sound Styling in Film and Television Genres’, ‘Strategic Communication’, and ‘The Audiovisual exhibited – Sound in the (fine) Arts’. The event takes place from 26-28 May 2011.

Here is some more information the ‘mobile’ track, and then about the  the conference in general, all from their website.

Mobile mediated audiovisuality

Keywords: mobility, audiovisuality, mp3-files, mobile telephones, lap tops, experience, soundwalks.

We naturally associate sound with the source that produces it. We instinctively look for a bird when we hear chirping or for the truck when we hear its roaring, and we are in some sense aware of the orchestra playing the concert we are enjoying whether it is live or recorded. Since the invention of Read the rest of this entry »

Sounding out the quantative & visual world of ‘Future Internet and Society’

I was attending the ESF-COST High-Level Research Conference ‘Future Internet and Society: A Complex Systems Perspective‘ last week I can tell you that I haven’t seen to many visualisations, graphs and algorithms in a very long time…
I gave a poster presentation on ‘Mobile Internet: The role of sound for interactions with networked and urban space’ and also represented ‘my’ COST IC0601 Action on Sonic Interaction Design (SID).


Despite the heavy visual and quantitative focus there were of course some interesting projects that I would love to see explored in the sonic context:
Ciro Cattuto from the Complex Networks and Systems Group and ISI Foundation in Italy presented ‘Weaving on-line connections on real-world interactions’,

Harith Alani from the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at The Open University (UK) talked about ‘Semantics, sensors, and the social web’,

Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University in the US gave a talk on ‘Network science meets web science: The emergence of multidimensional networks’,

Guenther Sagl (Research Studios Austria and Studio iSPACE in Austria) presented ‘Large-scale collective fluctuations: Human dynamics seen by a cellular network’,

Andrea Scharnhorst from the Virtual Knowledge Studio at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences talked about  ‘Web science or Web research? Changing practices in the social sciences and humanities’

and Fabrizio Sestini from the European Commission presented the upcoming call ‘Internet Science’ that encourages interdisciplinary networks of excellence to apply.

I’ll share a few of my notes on each of these presentations in the following posts.
Some of the non-scientific highlights of the conference included iPads as torches for night walks to the beach (swimming and spotting star constellations); a walk around the interesting neighbourhood of Naples train station with newly-met colleagues (culminating in a well-deserved gelato); swimming, cliff-diving and caving around the local bay; a trip to Maratea; the sound of waves during the nights; the spectacular thunder storm; and of course the football match against the hotel staff. But rest assured – we spent most of the time in the ‘cave‘ of the hotel, ‘illuminated’ by a projector and listening to the many presentations.

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.