Journal of Sonic Studies
About this portal
The portal is used to publish contributions for the online OA Journal of Sonic Studies, the storage of A/V materials, and the storage of previous issues.
contact person(s):
Marcel Cobussen ,
Vincent Meelberg url:
http://sonicstudies.org/about
Recent Activities
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Using Participatory Visualization of Soundscapes to compare Designers’ and Listeners’ Experiences of Sound Designs
(2018)
author(s): Iain McGregor
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
There are numerous rules and well-established guidelines to help designers with the visual appearance of interactive technologies. In contrast, when it comes to the use of sound, there is a paucity of practical information regarding design for euphony, excepting musical composition. This paper addresses this hiatus by describing a theoretically based, practical method for evaluating the design of the auditory components of interactive technologies and media. Specifically, the method involves eliciting the auditory experiences of users of these technologies and media and comparing them with what the sound designers had intended. The method has been comprehensively tested in trials involving 100 users (listeners), and the results have been described as “useful” and “invaluable” by a group of 10 professional sound designers.
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Sound Design for Media: Introducing Students to Sound
(2018)
author(s): Karen Collins
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In today’s multimedia world, an understanding of non-visual modalities, particularly sound, is of great benefit to design. With the use of digital technologies within design and art practices, the affordances for sound are frequently present, but often under-used and misunderstood by those with an education that privileges the visual mode at the expense of other modalities. Despite the importance of sound within multimedia applications and the fact that digital art, video games, film, branding, and product design today all require some understanding of the sonic realm, art and design students often complete their degrees without following a single class related to sound and its perception. In this paper, we introduce several exercises undertaken in interdisciplinary sound design courses taught to undergraduate designers, artists, and game developers with the aim of illustrating a scaffolding approach to teaching about sound.
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From Foley to Function: A Pedagogical Approach to Sound Design for Novel Interactions
(2018)
author(s): Daniel Hug
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Increasingly, devices of everyday use employ computing technology. Due to small or absent screens and their ubiquity in the environment, these interactive commodities might benefit from the consideration of sound in their design and use. However, the criteria for appropriate, enjoyable and useful sonic interactions and suitable pedagogical methods for educating future designers in this area still remain to be explored.
We want to encourage design students to create “sounds for tomorrow” in an explorative way, inspired by the sound pioneers of “New Hollywood,” who employed techniques of the avant-garde to establish new sonic identities. We implemented a design process in a workshop setting, continuously scrutinizing sound design and interpretational strategies. The process evolved over three connected stages: Foley-based and electroacoustic Wizard-of-Oz mockups and functional prototypes. Real time sound making, performance of interactions, and critical reflection on the aforementioned are central to our approach. In this article, we elaborate on the method, discuss design cases, and present pedagogical insights.
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Alarming Atmospheres - Embodied Sound Habituation as Design Strategy in a Neuro-Intensive Care Unit
(2018)
author(s): Marie Koldkjær Højlund
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to prepare children for the alarming atmosphere they will enter when visiting a hospitalised relative. The complex soundscape dominated by alarms and sounds from equipment is mentioned as the main stressor. As a response to this situation, our design artefact, the interactive furniture Kidkit, invites children to become accustomed to the alarming sounds sampled from the ward while they are waiting in the waiting room. Our design acknowledges how atmospheres emerge as temporal negotiations between the rhythms of the body and the environment in conjunction with our internalised perception of the habituated background. By actively controlling the sounds built into Kidkit, the child can habituate them through a process of synchronising them with her own bodily rhythms. Hereby the child can establish, in advance, a familiar relationship with the alarming sounds in the ward, enabling her to focus later more on the visit with the relative. The article discusses the proposed design strategy behind this solution and the potentiality for its use in hospital environments in general.
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Editorial: Designing Our Sonic Lives
(2018)
author(s): Vincent Meelberg
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Long ago, the mice held a council to discuss how to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. The mice knew that the Cat was sly and that she always approached them quietly, and they were frightened by these sudden encounters. After long discussions, one young and enthusiastic mouse raised his hand and proposed: “All we need is a sign that the Cat is around,” and continued, “Let’s fasten a bell round the neck of the Cat. This way, we’ll be warned by the jingling sound and have enough time to reach our holes before the Cat reaches us.” This proposal was met with cheers, until an old skeptical mouse asked, “But, who is to bell the Cat?”
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TOUCHING AS LISTENING: PULSE PROJECT
(2018)
author(s): Michelle Lewis-King
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Pulse Project (2011 - ) is a performance series exploring the social interfaces between self and other, art and science, contemporary western music composition and traditional Chinese medicine. This performance-study series aims to interrogate the axioms that underpin contemporary medicine and digital technology through the exploration of its corollary “other” - traditional Chinese medicine and music theory - in order to generate a new approach to embodiment and soundscape composition.