Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  Editorial: One Month in the Life of the JSS Editors (2018) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  All JSS issues up to now, perhaps with the exception of JSS1, have been special ones, dealing with a specific theme: listening, television sounds, sonic epistemologies. (The upcoming JSS6 will be devoted to sound design, by the way.) JSS5 is special in another way: seldom will an issue of a journal be filled completely by texts and A/V materials composed by the editors of that journal themselves. Editors typically provide an opportunity to others to present their work, their experiences, their thoughts, their research, their findings; this time, however, the JSS editors use their own journal as a platform to display some of their own reflections on sound studies and sound art.[1] Shameless self-promotion or healthy pragmatism? The most important reason is that we think that the two items presented in this issue – a report of an expert meeting on auditory culture and a handful of mini-essays inspired by a sound art exhibition – might interest our readers: the first because it features efforts to transgress scientific and academic barriers in and through sound studies, the second because it presents a new way to write around sound art.
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  Editorial: Aiming for an Impossibility? (2018) author(s): Vincent Meelberg published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, theorizing about sound must be like running about interior design. It would be useless, a hopeless endeavor that would not lead to any insight into the phenomenon under analysis. Nevertheless, stubborn as we are, we are convinced that it is possible, and even necessary, to attempt to articulate, through language as well as through other means, sound and sonic encounters in all their diversities.
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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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