Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
Animas: Disaster, Data, and the Resonance of a River
(2019)
author(s): Brian House
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this paper, I discuss the conceptual framework and development of Animas, an artwork which links sounding materials to the Animas River in Colorado. The Animas River is heavily contaminated by leakage from abandoned gold mines, including a 2015 spill in which three million gallons of wastewater were accidentally released into the river by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), turning the water a bright orange and threatening agriculture, tourism, and an already “disturbed” alpine ecology. Animas draws on precedents in sound art and explores transduction as a means of relating to more-than-human agencies and avoiding over-simplified representations of environmental degradation. Changes in the clarity of the water, invisible indicators of the dissolved metals within it, and the dynamics of its daily and seasonal flows all become sound in the gallery, producing timbral "color" from the river's continually changing composition—these data are provided by the Southern Ute Water Quality Program and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The piece acknowledges how our limited temporal sensibilities are challenged by the imbrication of the geologic time of minerals, the historical time of extractive industries, and the immediate urgency of equitable responses to ecological change.
Sonic Information Design
(2018)
author(s): Stephen Barrass
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
The International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) is a multidisciplinary community that includes researchers with backgrounds in music, computer science, psychology, engineering, neuroscience, and the sonic arts. Although this multi-disciplinarity has been beneficial, it has also been the cause of clashes between scientific and artistic research cultures. This paper addresses this divide by proposing design research as a third and complementary approach that is particularly well aligned with the pragmatic and applied nature of the field. The proposal, called sonic information design, is explicitly founded on the design research paradigm. Like other fields of design, sonic information design aspires to make the world a better place, in this case through the use of sound. Design research takes a user-centered approach that includes participatory methods, rapid prototyping, iterative evaluation, situated context, aesthetic considerations, and cultural issues. The results are specific and situated rather than universal and general and may be speculative or provocative, but should provide insights and heuristics that can be reused by others. The strengthening and development of design research in auditory display should lay the path for future commercial applications.