Workshops
Please note that there are limited number of spots for the following workshops: “Workshop with the Open Ambisonics Toolkit” and “Designing the Sound of Sustainability with Sonification Experts”. If either of these workshops shows up as full in the booking system, please contact the workshops organizer directly to ask if there is a waiting list.
The following workshops will be presented at ICAD2023:
Sonic Tilt Competition
Workshop with the Open Ambisonics Toolkit
Designing the Sound of Sustainability with Sonification Experts
The Contest for the Sound of all Human Knowledge
Panel Discussion: Audio-Visual Analytics Community – Bringing Senses to Mind
Sonic Tilt Competition
For attendees that are joining remotely, please use the following information:
https://uni-hamburg.zoom.us/j/63457945241?pwd=dG1QMkhuOUFOSmhYakZVR2JRNThnQT09
Meeting-ID: 634 5794 5241
Passcode: 31678881
Workshop with the Open Ambisonics Toolkit
The increasing number of possible applications for spatial audio technologies has caused renewed interest in the subject from academic institutions and resulted in a more widespread diffusion of techniques and practices. However, the lack of an integrated methodology for teaching these technologies is clear. This served as a motivation for our team to develop the Open Ambisonics Toolkit (OAT), a hardware-software system for spatial sound pedagogy.
We are actively promoting a democratisation of spatial audio through a DIY approach, and our aim is to serve tertiary educational institutions and individuals alike. For the ICAD Conference, we propose a practical, hands-on Workshop with OAT. Participants will be familiarised with its modules, learn about the design of a low-cost Ambisonics system, try out one or more spatial configurations of custom-built loudspeakers, and participate in listening tests, optionally using their own sonic materials.
After having completed the workshop, participants will have acquired knowledge about Ambisonics technologies implemented in Pd running on Raspberry PI; insights into a pragmatic design of a low-cost 3D hardware-software system; and gained experience and critical skills through listening tests. They will be able to download or copy OAT software, design manuals, and theory materials.
Further information is available at the project website: http://soundlab.scm.cityu.edu.hk/teachingstart-up-grant-2022-23/
Participant prerequisites: There are no special prerequisites, but a basic knowledge of Ambisonics will be helpful.
Participant equipment: Only if you want to use your own sonic materials.
Contact person: PerMagnus Lindborg pm.lindborg@cityu.edu.hk
Designing the Sound of Sustainability with Sonification Experts
The use and display of data within sustainability research and design is a major challenge. Whilst the fundamental issues of resource use, carbon emissions and climate change are all often described using traditionally scientific representations such as graphs, projections, or simply numbers, these methods often fail to convey the data in a powerful or easily comprehensible way.
Researchers in the field of sustainability and sustainable HCI have begun to develop methodologies for exploring this issue by physicalizing or gamifying data in order to make it more actionable.
In early June we will be running a workshop at the International Conference on Information and Communications Technology for Sustainability (ICT4S) conference in Rennes in which we will invite sustainability researchers to consider how to apply sonification methods to energy use data. This will result in a set of initial design ideas for sonifications which we will bring to ICAD for this second workshop.
In this second workshop, thanks to the advanced expertise in sound and sonification of the ICAD participants, we will attempt to further develop and implement the design suggestions gathered during at ICT4S. A third session will then be organized to present the results of the two workshops to the ICT4S and ICAD participants. This final session will be organised within the context of the KTH Sound for Energy Research Project (https://soundforenergy.net)
Participant prerequisites: No prerequisites, however knowledge of sonification techniques and/or sound design/sound synthesis/sound processing are desirables.
Participant equipment: Laptop with any sound/sonification software the participant is familiar with and headphones.
Contact persons: Yann Seznec yannse@kth.se and Sandra Pauletto pauletto@kth.se
The Contest for the Sound of all Human Knowledge
Seeking information has become a listening experience for many people around the world. Content from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is everywhere, but often not identified as such in audio settings. To address this gap, the Wikimedia Foundation created a global contest to find a sound logo, the Sound of all Human Knowledge.
Informed by our community values and previous community contests for visual logos we designed a contest adapted for the parameters of sound. The interpretations of our creative prompts were fascinating.
During this presentation, we will play the winning sound, the top candidates and other memorable submissions as we unpack this endeavor. We would also to share the lessons learned from this unique sonic contest and invite the attendees to assist us in iterating and adapting for future instances.
How would you capture the spirit of Wikimedia in a sound logo?
Participant prerequisites: None.
Participant equipment: None.
Contact person: Tas Elias telias@wikimedia.org
Panel Discussion: Audio-Visual Analytics Community – Bringing Senses to Mind
“In our brains, there are topological maps that map the space around us. They are fed information by both the visual system and the auditory system. The two maps must coincide precisely in order to be able to detect and match the location of a sound source both visually and auditorily. If these maps were not aligned, we might see a dog on the right whose barking was coming from the left, which would confuse us greatly. Now, the matching of different sensory maps is not a trivial problem of developmental biology. After all, the maps initially develop independently of each other and then have to be matched to each other. This matching occurs with the help of experience. Babies learn over time to match the different maps of their sensorium. Now one can ask: Who adapts to whom, the acoustic map to the visual one or vice versa? In the meantime it is considered as certain that first the visual map is fixed and then the acoustic one is adapted to it. From this it can be deduced that the greater reliability is attributed to the visual system and the acoustic system has to adapt.”
(W. Singer, “Das Bild in uns. Vom Bild zur Wahrnehmung.”in Bildtheorien. Anthropologische Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, K. Sachs, Ed. Suhrkamp, pp. 104–126. Translation adapted from DeepL.com).
How do we combine our auditory and visual perception of presented information to arrive at a result that is convincing for our overall sense-making? Based on Singer’s observations, what can we infer about designing a method for analyzing audio-visual data? Is sonification restricted to skill-based behavior level, despite the cognitive potential of our auditory system? Does sonification merely indicate potential abnormalities that need to be confirmed visually? Or can sonification be developed to function at a level equivalent to visualization in terms of our perception and sense-making abilities? As an illustration of how cross-sensory sense-making can be achieved in audio-visual data analysis, we will share our observations on identifying clusters through parallel coordinate systems at both auditory and visual levels. These observations are based on the reflection of our sense-making process and are not intended to be evaluated in a scientific sense. Rather, they are meant to serve as a starting point for our panel discussion and, potentially, for future research endeavors.
The Audio-Visual Analytics Community (AVAC) aims to bring together experts from both the visualization and sonification communities to inspire cross-disciplinary collaboration and unlock new
insights and possibilities for audio-visual data analysis, challenging established ways of thinking and exploring uncharted territories. ICAD 2023 being hosted at Linköping University, with its strong internationally recognized research focus on visualization, is a perfect opportunity to facilitate the gathering of researchers from the fields of sonification and visualization.
To facilitate an insightful and productive discussion, we invited scholars from both communities to participate to join a panel discussion on the topic:
– Sara Lenzi (TU Delft)
– Paul Vickers (Northumbria University)
– Daniel Västfjäll (Linköping University)
– Ingrid Hotz (Linköping University)
– Katharina Groß-Vogt (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz)
– Camilla Forsell (Linköping University)
Moderation:
– Michael Iber (St Pölten University of Applied Sciences)
– Kajetan Enge (St Pölten University of Applied Sciences and University of Music and Performing Arts Graz)
Participant prerequisites: None.
Participant equipment: None.
Contact person: Kajetan Enge kajetan.enge@fhstp.ac.at