Sonic Objects Research Articles

SonicVista: Towards Creating Awareness of Distant Scenes through Sonification

Spatial awareness, particularly awareness of distant environmental scenes known as vista-space, is crucial and contributes to the cognitive and aesthetic needs of People with Visual Impairments (PVI). In this work, through a formative study with PVIs, we establish the need for vista-space awareness amongst people with visual impairments, and the possible scenarios where this awareness would be helpful. We investigate the potential of existing sonification techniques as well as AI-based audio generative models to design sounds that can create awareness of vista-space scenes. Our first user study, consisting of a listening test with sighted participants as well as PVIs, suggests that current AI generative models for audio have the potential to produce sounds that are comparable to existing sonification techniques in communicating sonic objects and scenes in terms of their intuitiveness, and learnability. Furthermore, through a wizard-of-oz study with PVIs, we demonstrate the utility of AI-generated sounds as well as scene audio recordings as auditory icons to provide vista-scene awareness, in the contexts of navigation and leisure. This is the first step towards addressing the need for vista-space awareness and experience in PVIs.

On the Use of Field Recordings on Radio: A history of the beginnings

This article traces the history of the use and reception of field recordings on radio, in France and Britain, outside the categories considered as art or music such as hörspiel or musique concrète. It shows that radio producers had diverse reactions to the use of sonic ambiences recorded in the field. There was an opposition between a ‘Pure Sound School’, which promoted the use of field recordings instead of voice to depict the environment where the reporter was, and a school that privileged voice. If the use of recordings of sonic ambiences was not new, their utilisation on radio as elements autonomous in themselves was. They were falling between categories: they were not reports (because of the absence of voice), they were not musique concrète (because sounds were not modified and were presented within their context, that is, not as sound objects), they were not sound effects (because they lasted several minutes and could be composed through editing), and they were not wildlife recordings (because wildlife could be absent). Sonic ambiences were new sonic objects that took time to digest. This time also represented a listening mutation, and this will be analysed through the beginnings of radio documentaries and the works of sound hunters.

Object-Oriented Sociality: Marina Rosenfeld’s Sound Installation Art

ABSTRACT Marina Rosenfeld’s artistic practice is guided by the questions of what (and where) music can or should be. Over the last three decades, the artist and composer has explored these questions through both large-scale performances and intimate multimedia gallery installations, which, as she describes it, are invested in “acoustic architectures and experimental forms of sociality.” This article focuses on Rosenfeld’s gallery installations to consider the ways in which her multimedia work transforms the art gallery into a performative space. By closely attending to the materiality of Rosenfeld’s visual and sonic objects in a recent exhibition, this article explores the manner in which sound-based installation art affords an opportunity to grasp music’s dispersed object-hood as it circulates through and across materials, feelings, and spaces. The author argues that Rosenfeld’s installation practice reveals both music and sonic experience more broadly to be a multimedia, collaborative activity, and affords an opportunity to, in the words of Will Straw, trace the inescapable manner in which sound’s “technologies and assemblages” contribute to its shared social “meaning, affect, and memory.”

Mourning the Nightingale’s Song: The Audibility of Networked Performances in Protests and Funerals of the Arab Revolutions

Given the salient role of embodied tactics in contemporary networked protests in performance, in this essay I listen for how the embodied sonic praxis of protests during the Arab revolutions translates into the audio, visual, and text modalities of digital media. I propose audibility, or the appearance and perceptibility of sound objects, as that which translates the “live” sound that occurs in physical spaces into representational spaces, and, in so doing, alters the temporality and spatiality of the sonic experience. Interrogating who and what are rendered audible as part of the political contestations that drive protest actions, I demonstrate how audibility is a technological condition, sensory force, and social process through which affective publics emerge in networked spaces. I begin with social media posts from the first months of non-violent protest actions in 2011, in Egypt and Syria, analyzing the translation of sonic objects into written texts that narrativize the subjects and spaces of the Arab revolutions. I then shift to the sonic praxis of revolutionary mourning in a discussion of the audibility of the crowd in footage of protest funerals that reclaimed martyrs of the Syrian revolution in 2018 and 2019, interrogating how the sounds of the crowd enable the mythologization of the martyrs’ bodies and help mobilize the cause for which they died. Both approaches to audibility – as expressing voice and documenting sounds – underscore how audibility, I argue, is crucial for understanding the affect-rich intensities that drive networked protest performances, and that forge political possibilities as imaginable, sensible, and perceptible.

The media epistemic value of sonic analytics tools. A commentary

While automatized content identification of audio data, in critical discourse analysis, is bound to the symbolic order of monitoring, control, surveillance, censorship and copyright protection, the very tools and algorithms which have been developed for such purposes can be turned into instruments of knowledge production in the scientific sense. Audio content identification is not simply an extension of cultural taxonomies to machine listening, but an operation with its own eigen knowledge. Audio content identification is not simply a continuation of analog techniques for monitoring sonic objects. From a media-epistemological perspective, new forms of audio content identification open different orders of the sonic archive. What is practiced in the online domain has been preceded by experimental investigations of archival storage. The real l'archive, though, are the technological (hardware) and mathematical (software) criteria defining content identification. A media archaeology of audio content identification reveals the technological l'archive governing such forms of enunciation.

Re]Mixing Space: Charting Sonic Accessibility and Social Equity in Creative Urban Contexts

Sonic inclusion – the ways in which sound includes people in space – has received little attention in the design of the built environment. It is proposed that the design and management of contemporary urban space is grounded in an “auraltypical” perspective where the primary focus is those with “otologically normal” hearing. This position is driven by an idealized model of hearing that frames design through the binary positioning of “good/bad” ears and leads to spaces that are socially exclusive. In contrast, the emerging paradigm of “auraldiversity” acknowledges the diversity of human hearing and the multitude of elements that place the hearing modality within a state of constant flux. This article presents a case study of Remixing the Globe, a participatory sound mapping workshop and exhibition held at Shakespeare’s Globe, London in 2017. The workshop brought together a cohort of disabled adults, each with self-identified lived experience of sonic exclusion. The group utilized digital technologies, such as binaural microphones, pressure sensors and smartphone-activated sound stickers, to map sonic objects, environments and experiences throughout the building. Specific focus was given to mapping the elements of the environment that were understood as pertinent to the inclusion or exclusion of d/Deaf and disabled people. Findings emphasize the important role that sonic cartography can play in examining accessibility in urban space. The article calls for a new politics of sound mapping in which d/Deaf and disability embodiment is foregrounded and through which a critical examination of sound and social inclusion in urban spaces can begin to emerge.

Gaming Sober, Playing Drunk: Sound Effects of Alcohol in Video Games

This article develops a framework for associations between sounds, alcohol, and video games. Some recent studies (Olsen, in The video game debate: unraveling the physical, social, and psychological effects of digital games, Routledge, New York, pp 39–53, 2016; Cranwell et al., Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw 19(2):426–434, 2016) examine representations of drugs and alcohol in video games. While these studies raise serious concerns about drug and alcohol content in games, they primarily focus on the presence and stereotypical use of alcohol, offering limited attention to related sounds and music, or the increased integration between sound design and game-play. Through examples of video games and related media, this article provides historical, cultural, and music-theoretical groundwork for creating an associative soundscape of alcohol in multimedia experiences. After an initial examination of presence and censorship of alcohol content in video games, the article defines and explores four primary categories for representations of sound and alcohol in multimedia: (1) Sound Icons of Alcohol, which highlights sonic objects and their potential interpretive meanings; (2) Sound Environments, which considers cultural appropriations of music and sounds in locations associated with alcohol; (3) Representations of Drinking and Drunkenness, such as the use of specific orchestration or manipulations of musical parameters; and (4) Psychological and Physiological Effects of Sound and Alcohol, which looks specifically at altered sonic perceptions and ludic experiences.

Musical figures and the figuring of Tanzania’s social life in the poems of Kulikoyela K. Kahigi

Mugyabuso M. Mulokozi and Kulikoyela K. Kahigi’s collection Malenga wa Bara (Poets from the Inland), first published in 1976 and reprinted in 1995, includes a number of poems by Kahigi in which music instruments, musical styles and music-making are used as poetic devices to represent various experiences drawn from the social world. This article discusses the ways in which musical figures (i.e. sonic or musical objects) are used in these poems and the effect on their meaning and flavour. The analysis shows that such musical figures play an important role in shaping the way that the world – or realities outside the poem – are perceived sonically. These realities include work, rituals, festivals, love relationships and political struggles.

Linnaeus, Zoomusicology, Ecomusicology, and the Quest for Meaningful Categories

“Music” is not a scientific term. In the course of time, it has become like a big container, where sonic objects and practices that have nothing in common are put together. It carries so many historical and cultural connotations as to make it unfit for scholarly discourse about the social use of sound.

Sonic boundary objects: negotiating disability, technology and simulation

ABSTRACTIn this article, we present the concept of sonic boundary objects by discussing the case of binaural sound recordings as a tool, which helps to negotiate between blind and sighted experiences of an urban soundscape. We begin with developing the theoretical underpinning of the concept of a sonic boundary object by briefly elaborating on the relevance of the concept of the boundary object in the context of disability and technology; we then explain the special properties of binaural recordings and revisit the musicological concept of the sound object, whose relationship with technology partly inspired the work in this article. After introducing these concepts and related practices we proceed by proposing the term of a sonic boundary object. We discuss the relationship of the sonic boundary object with the concept of simulation in the context of disability studies and we then elaborate on its potential impact as a complementary practice to blind ethnography and to participatory design approaches. We will demonstrate its ethnographic potential with an account of the authors’ experience using binaural recordings to exchange on what blind navigation is like in Montreal. The article concludes with a first-person reflection on this experience and possible fields of application.

Sound on Sound

Sociologists have yet to theorize interactions with sonic materiality. In this article I introduce an analytical concept for the observation of interactions with sound. Sound has material effects in all situations. But the audibility of sonic objects is a relation of situated actors to material arrangements. Sonic object settings are dynamic material arrangements in which sonic qualities emerge for interpretation. The concept synthesizes research on sonic materiality, audibility, and interaction. After outlining the concept, I present an empirical illustration from an audio firm’s R&D laboratory arranged to support a new technology called object-based audio. I observed engineers conducting two concurrent but contrasting experiments; results indicate how settings both enable and constrain the interpretation of sound.

Sonic Objects, Resonance and Chaotics

The author describes structural elements for and the conditions and contexts within which he creates his work. The recurring use of fractals and resonance is integral to the construction of sound objects.

Images of Sonic Objects

Based on innumerable informal accounts and a number of scientific studies, there can be no doubt that people often have quite vivid images of musical sound in their minds, and that this is the case regardless of levels of musical training. Various introspective accounts and more recent neurocognitive research seem to converge in suggesting that imagery for music is closely linked with imagery for music-related actions. In this paper, the consequences of sound–action links for our notions of the sonic image are discussed, with a particular focus on the relationship between sonic objects and action chunks. In conclusion, the exploitation of action imagery is seen as holding great promise in enhancing our means for musical imagery in various creative, research and educational contexts.

Gender, race and the ethical praxis of slide guitar

This article explores slide guitar as the basis for an ethics of listening. Here, slide guitar serves as a metaphor through which alternative possibilities of hearing, performing, thinking, and living might be explored. By analyzing slide guitar and the particular sonic elements that characterize its tone and techniques of sounding, I argue that sliding—with all of the risks its movement entails—signifies a mode of recursive questioning through which totalizing gestures might be eluded or radically undercut. As a mode of maneuvering that is both interrogative and generative, slide's gestures prompt us to consider the ways in which its poised instability might yield an expanded breadth of critical movement—one whose stakes need to be considered in relation to race and gender's intersectional bearing on its production (or smooth elision) of sonic subjects and objects.

Music, Electronic Media and Culture

Contents: Introduction, Simon Emmerson Part One: Listening and interpreting: Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds, Luke Windsor Simulation and reality: the new sonic objects, Ambrose Field Beyond the acousmatic: hybrid tendencies in electroacoustic music, Simon Waters Part Two: Cultural noise: Plunderphonics, Chris Cutler Crossing cultural boundaries through technology?, Simon Emmerson Cacophony, Robert Worby Part Three: New places, spaces and narratives: Art on air: a proile of new radio art, Kersten Glandien 'Losing touch'? the human performer and electronics, Simon Emmerson Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in two works for sound alone, Katharine Norman Index.