ARCAA: a framework to analyse the artefact ecology in computer music performance

This paper presents ARCAA (Actors, Role, Context, Activity, Artefacts), a framework that supports designers in understanding the artefact ecology in the music performance scenario, in particular, allowing to frame the role of the different actors. The ARCAA framework is the result of the combination of two different areas of HCI: artefact ecology concept, and design framework for digital musical instruments. The model borrows three categories from MINUET an established design framework and rethinks them from an ecological perspective. In ARCAA, these three categories are used as three lenses to connect each human actor to her artefact ecology. Finally, the framework allows comparing how the various artefacts create connections among the different people involved. The second part of the paper describes a case study that shows a practical adoption of the framework

Soundfullness in early childhood education: An ecological sound art inquiry with educators and children

Sounds exist everywhere, and early childhood classrooms are no exception. Sounds resonate with us, and sometimes they move us. However, engagement with sound has a limited trajectory. This thesis traces movements from a sound inquiry in an early childhood centre through three research questions: (a) How is sound consumed and produced in ECE? (b) What other ways of being might be enacted through sounds and ecological sound art in ECE? (c) How might sound become an agentic entity through pedagogical documentation and digital technology? The inquiry took a multimodal approach using text and sound, and embraced methods of ecological sound art, common worlding, and pedagogical documentation. Guided by the research questions, I offer interpretations of the sonic data to examine what sounds from the everyday do in a classroom. Sonic data are included to allow readers to listen to the classroom installations and experience new movements and thinking

Designing Interactive Sonic Artefacts for Dance Performance: an Ecological Approach

In this paper, we propose to consider the sonic interactions that occurs in a dance performance from an ecological perspective. In particular, we suggest using the conceptual models of artefact ecology and design space. As a case study, we present a work developed during a two weeks artistic residency in collaboration between a sound designer, one choreographer, and two dancers. During the residency both an interactive sound artefact based on a motion capture system, and a dance performance were developed. We present the ecology of an interactive sound artefact developed for the dance performance, with the objective to analyse how the ecology of multiple actors relate themselves to the interactive artefact

Personal Artifact Ecologies in the Context of Mobile Knowledge Workers

Recent work suggests that technological devices and their use cannot be understood in isolation, and must be viewed as part of an artifact ecology. With the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), studying artifact ecologies is essential in order to design new technologies with effective affordances. This paper extends the discourse on artifact ecologies by examining how such ecologies are constructed in the context of mobile knowledge work, as sociotechnical arrangements that consist of technological, contextual, and interpretive layers. Findings highlight the diversity of ICTs that are adopted to support mobile work practices, and effects of individual preferences and contextual factors (norms of collaboration, spatial mobility, and organizational constraints)

Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place

What can we gather from sounding the past? This interdisciplinary art studies project will research various forms of sound from the past, and designing sound for the past, to consider what knowledge and applications can be gained from the concept, particularly within a culture and cultural history in which the visual is predominant within a segregated sensory hierarchy in mediating our perception of the world around us. Within that, this thesis proposes that the relationship between our soundscape and creative sound design can give us key information about how we listen, what we listen for, and what that can tell us. This thesis will show that this information holds benefits and contributions towards many disciplines-including art and cinema, archive studies, ethnography, and ecology-which will be investigated in-depth through practice-based research, case studies, philosophical inquiry, and a new path in sound studies connecting soundscape ecology, sound ethnography, sound art and design, and aural culture

The Noisy-Nonself: Towards A Monstrous Practice of More-Than-Human Listening

Environmental sound arts are based on a long-term engagement with nonhuman subjects through disciplines such as bioacoustics, acoustic ecology, field recording, and soundscape studies. Recording and representing the sounds of animals and environmental phenomena have been essential to such practices and their archival and arts-based impact. Throughout these more-than-human histories, however, there has been a relative lack of attention given to the presence of recordists themselves. This article endeavors to re-hear the fringe identity of the environmental field recordist and analyze the promises and threats of self-erasure. I propose a new concept, the Noisy-Nonself, as a way of understanding such an identity. It is a chimeric figuration that seeks to collapse human, animal, and technological binaries, prompt ethical critique, and ask, “ what are the consequences of hearing our own monsters?

Tough Vinyl: Packing In Our Record Collections

This paper seeks to illuminate a series of contradictions between the way we talk about, write about, and interact with vinyl records on the one hand, and the material and social relations required for the use, production, and disposal of vinyl records on the other. I examine vinyl as both an ethical commodity (the sonic equivalent to slow food) and as "the poison plastic"; vinyl as both a medium for "subaltern" voices and as a toxic substance that causes cancer in the bodies of working class communities of colour; and vinyl as it both preserves the dead and destroys the living. These contradictions and many more, all part of what I call the vinyl-network, are exposed throughout this paper in a process of de-fetishizing vinyl. The central argument of this paper is that the nostalgia for petrocapitalism's 20th century bounty (of which records are an iconic piece), is a dangerous fetish that perpetuates destructive social and material relations. Ultimately, I contend we need to abandon the vinyl revival and mourn the vinyl record, lest the way we listen to recorded music perpetuate the destructive economic system that is petrocapitalism, enabling it to spin on and on like a broken record. If we cannot move beyond this economic system, the dead will continue to pile up; we will repeat the same tragedies, different not in cause but in effect, as temperature and sea levels rise, as the Anthropocene Extinction Event wipes out one quarter of all mammals on earth, and as the screams of the dying are drowned out by the bourgeoisie's hi-fi. This paper concludes with the suggestion that we take the broken record that is petrocapitalism, smash it into a million pieces, and feed it to a hungry colony of soil fungi

That Doesn\u27t Sound Like Me: Student Perceptions of Semiotic Resources in Written-Aural Remediation Practices

This dissertation examines students\u27 composing practices when working with unfamiliar modalities, attending to students\u27 messy material and cognitive negotiations prior to their production of a polished multimodal project. Working from a conceptual vocabulary from composition studies and semiotics, I frame composing as an act of semiotic remediation, attending to students\u27 repurposing and understanding of written and aural materials in composition and their impact on their learning. Specifically, this research uses a grounded theory methodology to examine the attitudes, experiences, and composing practices of first-year writing students enrolled in a composition II course at a private, liberal arts institution in the South who were tasked with revising their writing into–and through–sound editing software to complete an audio revision project. This study examines the practices and evolving attitudes of seven students using various materials and the impact of their composing process on learning and interpersonal development. Findings from this study are used to develop a body of concepts that work together to theorize about the impact of semiotic remediation on students\u27 composing practices and their learning

Sounding Materiality : Explorations In Resonant Practice

How might we explore material agency in sound arts practice to promote more ecological ways of knowing our world? Through practice-based inquiry what methodologies might emerge that can provide a framework for novel, open ways of exploring the relation between sound and materiality? Sounding Materiality is an account of arts research that works at the intra-face (Barad 2000) of theory and practice. Through the critical analysis and portrayal of three case-studies, the thesis contributes two novel sound practice techniques of ‘live composition’ and ‘locative sound’, which it is proposed enable a closer and more fruitful relationship between materiality and sound. Within the case-studies that underpin the thesis, the process of experimenting with an expanded source bond between sound, meaning, and materiality leads to diverse explorations with natural systems, haptic art, phonography, sonic spatialisation, and participatory practice. Three sound-based installations are the catalysts for these inquiries, including two place-specific works driven by natural processes, Variable 4 and Living Symphonies, and the haptic sound installation Tactus, conceived as a direct communicative artwork for the blind and visually impaired. These iterative works took place over the seven-year duration of this thesis (2010–2017) and have been exhibited publicly, with cross media documentation of their occurrences imbricated in this text. In their critical analysis two distinct contributions to sound practice emerge: ‘live composition’, a framework that uses sonification and generative techniques to drive real-time sound composition based on live source data, and ‘locative sound’ a technique that promotes the placing of sound in the reality of the world, drawing relationships of ‘synchresis’ (Chion 1994) between materiality and composed ‘sonic events’ (Cox 2015). A methodological framework of ‘resonant practice’ inspired by Schön’s ‘reflective practitioner’ (Schön 1987) emerges by reflection on these case-studies, portraying a praxis built on specific methodologies of ‘material thinking’ (Carter 2004), iteration, dialogic collaboration, and communication of knowing through an ‘artstext’. ‘Resonant practice’ takes an ‘acoustemological’ approach (Feld 1994), venturing that an arts research project rooted in sounding materiality promotes unique, ecological and vibrant ways of knowing through sound. Through a resonant practice artists working with sound can aim to propagate a ‘vibrant materialism’ (Bennett 2010), forwarding communicative, ecological and sustainable approaches to our sonic and material environment