Interactive Sonification Workshop

On the 18th of November the 6th Interactive Sonification Workshop, this time held as a special session of the NordicSMC Conference. The event occurred at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, embedded in the campus’ vibrant and historical atmosphere, where the new is inspired by the old, novelty by tradition. In this year’s edition the theme orbited around the Interactive Sonification Enabling Inclusion and Creativity. In the organising committee, Roberto Bresin and Thomas Hermann were appointed conference chairs, and Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen and Sandra Pauletto paper chairs.

After a warm welcoming session, the remainder part of the morning was dedicated to oral presentations of research work within the interactive sonification field. Topics ranged from monitoring of dynamic processes in control rooms, correction of poor sitting posture while working, neurorehabilitation, cardiac diagnostic and monitoring, and sports performance. The interdisciplinarity of the presented content motivated discussion, suggestions and questions from the audience, often resulting in fruitful advice and new research opportunities. Overall it seems that current trends in the field are not exploring how AI can be used in sonification. More information is avaiable in the conference’s proceedings.

The second part of the conference began with a keynote given by Kristina Höök on Soma Design, intertwining aesthetics, ethics and movement. Here the focus was on the importance of the body, of emotions and subjective understanding, from a designer’s perspective. In this engaging talk, the ideal of what a better life might be was addressed, covering topics such as balance and breathing and how can these be explored in the design process. Next, an additional paper presentation session revolved around bimanual coordination tapping tasks and laptop orchestra chamber music.

Activities were moved to the MIDDLA Studio and there was now time for the Design Fiction workshop under the topic “The Soundscape of the Future”, supervised by Jarmo Laaksolahti. Following a brief presentation, participants were invited to form groups and brainstorm about what the future will sound like. A recurrent and popular idea was that of a future in which a user would be able to completely reshape the surrounding soundscape, personalizing every sound of every source. Furthermore, in some groups this idea evolved towards thought/feeling sonification and its communication between multiple users. Finally, each group created a fictional newspaper headline encompassing a positive, a negative and a scandalous use-case of their idea.