Echoed Malice: Identity and the Doubled Voice in Gothic Horror

My dissertation argues we would benefit from focusing on the voice when analyzing gothic and horror texts. That is, I contend, there remains significant fertile ground for us to till in these texts if we shift our focus to the voice and its various iterations across these texts’ long history. To demonstrate this point, I delineate three variations of this theme: the doubled voice in the possession narrative, the split voice in the ventriloquist-dummy dynamic, and the inherent uncertainty of the voice without discernable origin. Each of these variations, I argue, offers fruitful readings of oft-studied texts and, moreover, offers interventions into existing scholarship on said texts. In Chapter Two, I discuss how attending to the voice in The Exorcist allows us to trace the texts culturally conservative notions, and how doing the same in Hawthorne’s “Egotism; Or, the Bosom-Serpent” allows us to read that story as a possession narrative investigating the role of the self in early American society. Then, in Chapter Three, I highlight a more conspicuous yet still understudied iteration of the voice in ventriloquism. Here, I argue that the ventriloquist-dummy dynamic splits the ventriloquist’s self, thereby making these texts rich for psychological exploration and deserving of further scholarly attention. And, finally, in Chapter Four, I turn to texts where the voice’s origin is questionable. Here, I argue that reading Poe’s “The Raven” as a ventriloquial text allows us to answer some prevailing concerns in Poe studies as well as to discern the voice’s potential for exploiting epistemic uncertainty and thereby destabilizing audiences

Creative Haptic Interface Design for the Aging Population

Audiovisual human-computer-interfaces still make up the majority of content to the public; however, haptic interfaces offer unique advantage over the dominant information infrastructure, particularly for users with a disability or diminishing cognitive and physical skills like the elderly. The tactile sense allows users to integrate new, unobstructive channels for digital information into their sensorium, one that is less likely to be overwhelmed compared to vision and audition. Haptics research focus on the development of hardware, improving resolution, modality, and fidelity of the actuators. Despite the technological limitations, haptic interfaces are shown to reinforce physical skill acquisition, therapy, and communication. This chapter will present key characteristics intuitive tactile interfaces should capture for elderly end-users; sample projects will showcase unique applications and designs that identify the limitations of the UI

Perceptual Evaluation of Spatial Audio for “Audio Nomad” Augmented Reality Artworks

Audio Nomad is a three-year art/science research collaboration on the creative and technological potentials of location-sensitive, mobile spatial audio. The first Audio Nomad productions were two versions of Syren – a ship-based multi-speaker installation using the ship’s position from a GPS receiver to render a two-dimensional soundscape. New work including Virtual Wall (Berlin) will create a personal location-sensitive spatial soundscape on headphones using a portable computer, GPS receiver and digital compass. The technological intent is to enable the artist to augment real world objects and spaces with sounds perceived to emanate from them. It is important to know the maximum perceivable accuracy of the intended augmented reality effect, given human and technology limitations, even if soundscape design doesn’t always require maximum precision. Ultimately, authoring software features will inform the artist of afforded perceptual quality, enabling better utilisation of the medium’s potential. Few similar projects have been produced to date and fewer have published quantitative perceptual evaluation research. This paper reviews the field and describes present experimental results and future work on the perceptual evaluation of binaural spatial audio for mobile augmented reality, especially Audio Nomad artworks

Multisensory interactive technologies for primary education: From science to technology

While technology is increasingly used in the classroom, we observe at the same time that making teachers and students accept it is more difficult than expected. In this work, we focus on multisensory technologies and we argue that the intersection between current challenges in pedagogical practices and recent scientific evidence opens novel opportunities for these technologies to bring a significant benefit to the learning process. In our view, multisensory technologies are ideal for effectively supporting an embodied and enactive pedagogical approach exploiting the best-suited sensory modality to teach a concept at school. This represents a great opportunity for designing technologies, which are both grounded on robust scientific evidence and tailored to the actual needs of teachers and students. Based on our experience in technology-enhanced learning projects, we propose six golden rules we deem important for catching this opportunity and fully exploiting it