Sound Design As Human Matter Interaction

In: Papenburg, Jens, Holger Schulze (Eds.): Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion. Cambridge, MA: MIT press 2016, p. 53-64., 2016, 2016

Is music made of elaborated melodic and harmonic structures that must be retraced through conscious listening? Or is music an initiated affective process derived from the forces of (acoustic) vibrations? How we answer these questions about the "primary material of music" is essential for the role that media technology can play in musical contexts. Even if we adopt the Solomonic approach of "on the one hand but on the other," we will usually also make some form of judgment that is informed by musical aesthetic traditions of thought. The paper discusses three approaches to 'material': The Sonic, Traditional Notation and - borrowing some thoughts from Th.W.Adorno - "Musical Material".

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2014

The following is a revised version of the text prepared by the author for his keynote speech at the opening session of the International Computer Music Conference 2013 (12.08.2013 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre, Perth, Western Australia). It bears on conceptual changes that have taken place, along the decades, in the shared notion of "computing" as relative to creative practices of sound-and music-making. In particular, the notion of computing is considered vis a vis the relationship, either implicity established or deliberately designed by practitioners, to the (necessarily hybrid) technological infrastructures of their work, as well as to the surrouding physical space where such practices take place. A path is outlined across subsequent connotations of computational tasks and the coupling (or decoupling) of computing resources to the physical environment: from "calculation", to "communication", to "media processing", to "embedded (or physical or tangible) interfaces". The author then illustrates features of a sound installation of his own, where a structural coupling is handled between the acoustics of a room environment and the equipment (the latter including simple computational resources, beside pro-and consumer-level electroaoustic tranducers). The example raises questions as to the potential complexity and richness of creative sound-making emerging when larger and larger sets of data streams -from different sources in the environment -are admitted to, and are coordinated as part of, the computing process. A comprehensive view of the "performance ecosystem" is needed to handle this strong integration of technological layers, and a practice-led account is needed to propertly situate the performer's (and listener's) body in such performative practices.

In this paper we aim at providing an overview of the relevant fields for designing sounds for interactive commodities. We take the standpoint of the designer, whose aim is to create a meaningful functional-aesthetic experience for the user. We describe the fields of research that we consider relevant for studying and understanding meaning-making processes in which sound plays a central role and present their application domains. We also propose an initial hypothetical classification of interactive commodities as a starting point for this research and propose future steps toward a better understanding of the hermeneutics of sound. This knowledge helps to develop methods and strategies for successful sound design, which so far seemed to depend mainly on intuition.

2019

Embodying Sound is a performing art project that integrates dance, music and digital technology, it explores a real-time sonification of human motion, captured by inertial sensors, using the XSens system. First and foremost, it is not a demonstration of technical virtuosity, but an attempt to put technology at the service of imagination and creativity. In a world dominated by computation - tending to a dystopic future of "artificial intelligences" [1], we tend to forget that present-day machines cannot really think or feel; Computers do not have purposes, do not love or understand reality the way a living organism does [2]. In this presentation, we explore how technology can act as a mediator between dance and music. The quest of this performative process is to investigate the sound signature of the body. Here we discuss how such phenomenological experience might challenge self-consciousness and the perception of identity. Furthermore, within a more general approach, we qu...

Journal of Visual Culture, 2011

Why does sound art remain so profoundly undertheorized, and why has it failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature? It is because the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic. In this article, the author proposes an alternative theoretical framework, a materialist account able to grasp the nature of sound and to enable analysis of the sonic arts. He suggests, moreover, that this theoretical account can provide a model for rethinking the arts in general and for avoiding the pitfalls encountered in theories of representation and signification

Proceedings of the SMC Conferences, 2008

Cyberspace is nowadays a social network of people that produce, reproduce and consume technology culture, or as it is better expressed, technoculture. In this vast environment, transmittable digital information represents sound. However, what is the function of sound and why does it matter? In the following pages, I shall present sound as the materiality of technoculture in cyberspace, or, the cultural meanings of sound beyond natural space.

Open Philosophy, 2021

This article aims at sketching a philosophical theory of sound based on the perspective of sound designers: unique agents blurring the boundaries between engineering, music, acoustics and sound-based art. After having introduced the general framing in Section 1, focusing on a short history of the theory and practice of sound design, in Section 2 we propose a reading of sound as monad. We derive such intuition from the technology of digital sampling of audio signals, based on the decomposition of complex sound waves in a number of elementary sinusoidal waves. Thus, in Section 3, we attempt at grounding the resulting "sound-atom" on Leibniz's notion of monad, intended both as a "simple substance without parts" and as a "nucleus of forces in statu possibilitatis." The insight is resumed and further discussed in Section 4, where we draw our conclusions by demonstrating the fitness of such framing with regards to the standpoint of sound design, while accounting for the work of sound artists Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda.

Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Auditory Display ( …, 2007

We describe an emergent field of considerable relevance to the auditory display community -that of sonic interaction design for everyday artifacts. It is positioned at the intersection of auditory display, product interaction design, and ubiquitous computing. We describe an exploration of this field that we have undertaken in a workshop setting, with an international mix of designers, students and researchers, aimed at investigating new roles for auditory display in everyday products, and possible methodologies for designing them. In this paper, we define sonic interaction design, describe the outcome of this workshop, which has been planned as the first in a series, and indicate future directions. We point to new research initiatives, including the European project CLOSED (Closing the Loop of Sound Evaluation and Design), which aims at providing new tools that are needed by designers working in this emerging field.

2022

This paper suggests that despite the acousmatic ethos that it does not matter how a sound was made established electroacoustic theory and aesthetics are largely linked to a composition method that concentrates on acoustic sound sources and transformations, and thus framed by a specific technological model. Correspondingly, the idiom is less ready to make sense of sounds that do not have a real or suggested acoustic profile or spatiality, such as sounds generated by non-standard synthesis and generative algorithms. With the help of Karen Barad's concept of intra-action, this paper substitutes the idea of source with the principle of synthesis. In doing this, technological listening – a mode defined by Denis Smalley indicating that technology is heard at the expense of music – is reframed. The view that technology is a means to an end is challenged through a speculative listening tactic that scans intra-faces, where sound is not conceptualised as a physical event, but rather as a ...