Sonifications for digital audio workstations:Reflections on a participatory design approach

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.Methods to engage users in the design process rely predominantly on visual techniques, such as paper prototypes, to facilitate the expression and communication of design ideas. The visual nature of these tools makes them inaccessible to people living with visual impairments. Additionally, while using visual means to express ideas for designing graphical interfaces is appropriate, it is harder to use them to articulate the design of non-visual displays. We applied a user-centred approach that incorporates various participatory design techniques to help make the design process accessible to visually impaired musicians and audio production specialists to examine how auditory displays, sonification and haptic interaction can support some of their activities. We describe this approach together with the resulting designs, and reflect on the benefits and challenges that we encountered when applying these techniques in the context of designing sonifications to support audio editing

Constructing sonified haptic line graphs for the blind student: first steps

Line graphs stand as an established information visualisation and analysis technique taught at various levels of difficulty according to standard Mathematics curricula. It has been argued that blind individuals cannot use line graphs as a visualisation and analytic tool because they currently primarily exist in the visual medium. The research described in this paper aims at making line graphs accessible to blind students through auditory and haptic media. We describe (1) our design space for representing line graphs, (2) the technology we use to develop our prototypes and (3) the insights from our preliminary work

Aleatoricism and the Anthropocene: Narrowing the divide between humanity and nature through chance-based art research

An important aspect of art is that it functions as a dialogical platform for the cultivation of ecological thought. In this thesis, I explore ways in which discourses on the Anthropocene can emerge through art that involves chance-based collaborations between humans and plants. As a case study, I examine selected works from American avant-garde composer John Cage, who used chance operations to construct musical compositions. Through his use of non-traditional plant-based instruments and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, Cage turned his attention to the inseparability of humanity and nature. I explore parallels between Cage’s approach and bio-sonification, a process of turning the biological rhythms of living entities into sound, which I use as a generative device to create aleatoric virtual piano compositions from plants’ electrical signals. Chance-based mechanisms in art production and approaches to environmental philosophy form the theoretical foundation for the arguments presented. This practice-based work explores the multitextured ecologies that human and non-human lifeforms are enmeshed within. It suggests that by challenging anthropocentric assumptions, ecologically engaged sound composition has the potential to generate discourses on the Anthropocene. Art about the Anthropocene can liberate us from a dichotomy of nature and culture, which facilitates the desecration of the natural world through unsustainable environmental practices that threaten the viability of life on Earth. Keywords bio-sonification, MIDI, indeterminism, chance-based art, ecological thought, practice-based, aleatoric music, generative art, John Cage, Anthropocen

Earth system music: music generated from the United Kingdom Earth System Model (UKESM1)

Scientific data are almost always represented graphically in figures or in videos. With the ever-growing interest from the general public in understanding climate sciences, it is becoming increasingly important that scientists present this information in ways that are both accessible and engaging to non-experts. In this pilot study, we use time series data from the first United Kingdom Earth System Model (UKESM1) to create six procedurally generated musical pieces. Each of these pieces presents a unique aspect of the ocean component of the UKESM1, either in terms of a scientific principle or a practical aspect of modelling. In addition, each piece is arranged using a different musical progression, style and tempo. These pieces were created in the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) format and then performed by a digital piano synthesiser. An associated video showing the time development of the data in time with the music was also created. The music and video were published on the lead author's YouTube channel. A brief description of the methodology was also posted alongside the video. We also discuss the limitations of this pilot study and describe several approaches to extend and expand upon this work