This section points to some considerations for possible future research on the subject of sonic affordances, which can help to explain how sonic experience supports bodily action. At the present stage, this does not constitute a developed research contribution as it goes beyond the scope of this research project, though it points towards a further line of development for future research.
As reviewed in Chapter 2, the concept of affordance relates to an ecological approach to psychology. An ecological approach to investigate a subject regards the entire components of the environment as somehow involved in the processes of the observed thing. The idea of sonic affordances can be described first as the potentiality of sound to afford a stream of specific actions from an agent. The word "afford" is particularly important in this case, more than the adjective "sonic". The original definition of affordance is a word coined by Gibson, created to explain a "furnishing" relationship – in terms of providing, supply, opportunity and causality – between the material world and the life of animals.
Affordances cannot be understood without considering the perspective of the subject for which something is afforded. Affordances are mappings of emergent functionalities between the perceiver and its environment towards emerging goals.
Affordances are special relationships. Rooted in an ecological perspective to psychology, the concept of affordances is based on the material quality of the world – its surfaces, substances, mediums of propagation of energy – and the specific sensorial apparatus of the animal in an interdependent relationship based on possible interactions. This has an affect both in terms of epigenetics of the individual and environmental changes. The concept of affordance helps to reduce the importance of intentionality of the willing subject in terms of its interaction with the world, by framing the question of action of an agent not necessarily in terms of decisions but in terms of action possibilities, which are specified by certain conditions – perceived or not – as they exist between the animals and the surrounding environment in a specific moment.
Regarding "sonic" affordance, a few questions arise. What is the "sonic" in sonic affordance? Is there a difference between how sound is perceived – if it is even perceived – for defining a "sonic affordance"? And when we say the words "sonic affordance", is there any specific sound we are thinking of, perhaps the sounds of an alarm going off or the one of a digital sinewave? Does it mean to think that sound has affordances (necessarily multiple ones) and even the possibility that it might not have one? Which sound? Does this, that or any sound make us do anything as a form of subtle irresistible synaptic reaction that activates our muscles individually and socially? This series of questions illustrates the complexity of dealing with the sonic component of an affordance. If sound can be considered a property of an object, we may argue that the sound of a violin does not necessarily afford the same thing as the violin as an object. A problem with the sound of the violin is that it can be understood to be a different subject to the "sound of a violin", in an archetypal sense. This difference is important in our understanding of affordances, as it unveils problematic aspects in terms of multiple hierarchies, perceivable and non-perceivable relationships, and non-hierarchies that this concept underlines. Affordances describe multiple actuated or unactuated relationships, an interconnection between the physical characteristics of the perceived thing and the cultural world, which simultaneously supports, surrounds and depicts it.
This analysis of sonic affordances centres around the idea of the "sonic" itself that I discussed earlier in this chapter, which I consider to be broader than the auditory consideration of sound. A sonic affordance will necessarily be derived from a
similar view to sound, as sound affords listening, hearing, sounding, thinking about sound and other forms of human participation in the phenomenon of sound. The pertinence of discussing the concept of sonic affordances is particularly relevant to Sonic Interaction Design, as we have seen in Chapter 2. I suggested that affordances are involved in the process of automatization (Still & Dark 2013) of a user's physical action with interfaces, reducing the involvement of reasoning about the action itself. This idea suggests that sounds – but also a listening situation – can be designed in order to facilitate the users to do only some specific actions, in terms of human movement, in an intuitive way.
The concept of Embodied Resonator introduced by Tuuri, as reviewed in Chapter 2, is important to explain sonic affordances and their relation to the sense-making of embodied action-sound relationships. Tuuri's argument for the embodied resonator is that perception of sound, listening, sensorimotor abilities and experience, are connected to the creation of mental images of action-relevant clues in the world. In Tuuri's words, the "embodied resonator functions as a mediator which permits patterns of sensation to be inferred in terms of mental imagery being projected from the structured nature of experiences" (Tuuri & Eerola 2012, p.145). This means that the inference of action-relevant clues perceived in hearing and imagining sound is not a unique static relationship of a stimuli-reaction type, rather it "resonates" a range of possible actions that are based on the perceiver's experience. This concept explains why, in our pilot user study in Chapter 3, when participants were able to identify the sound stimuli – or at least they were able to give a satisfactory description for them – they described the sound in terms of similar sound producing sources (e.g. the sound of knocking on a door instead of a percussive digital sound). It also explains why, when participants failed to build an association between known sounds from their everyday, they described the sound in more abstract terms and sometimes figures relating to the movements they performed (e.g. drawing circles in the air for describing continuous sound). In the workshops in Chapter 4 the embodied resonator was constantly involved when participants imagined possible bodily sonic interaction. We can explain this by discussing Tuuri's view of a pattern of sensations which can be evoked by mental imagining, and which we found in other literature on auditory stimuli (Hubbard 2010). In our workshops the pattern of sensations is evoked by imagining a sound already heard, using Retro-Active Listening and to re-evoke sonic incidents. This leads to a process of resonance of emerging action-sound relationships that
participants were able to draw upon in the imagery involved when they remembered themselves as listening.
Reviewing the results obtained in my research, I believe that Tuuri's concept of "embodied resonator" can provide a model in which sonic affordances are related to possible action-sound relationships as emerging in the context and experience of the perceiver, rather than exclusively in the sound in itself. We saw in Chapter 2 that Godøy proposed a model for the study of the relationship between gestures, sound and affordances. The gestural-sonorous interaction can be thought of as based on affordances of hearing sound for producing bodily gestures. These gestures follow trajectories and shapes linked to the spectromorphology of sound as it is mentally rendered. Tuuri's model extends this by relating the importance of the context and the experience of the listener, beyond the production of gestures. If we now analyse the data about description of sound and gestures from our pilot study and workshops in Chapters 2 and 3, we can look at how some of the participants described a sonic incident that came from an unknown sound source. Some of them described sounds in terms of mechanical actions involved in the production of the sound, while others described the processes involved for the actual discovery of the sound sources. When participants described these unknown sonic incidents, they would refer to other similar actions involved in the production of sound ("sounded like") and physical feelings involved ("the sound was stabbing my hears", P10) so that they could communicate the most-likely impression of sound. This process can be seen as an embodied resonance of thinking sound, relating physical sensations, meaning and referential elements of sound. This forms a three-layered dimension of sonic experience in which possible affordances arise, stemming from each of these levels of the perceiver’s consciousness, providing an excitement, through an "embodied resonance", of the relevant contextual actions that can be associated and/or performed. These observations are, at this stage, only preliminary and they could not have been possible without the research I undertook. Nevertheless, their inclusion in this discussion points towards a subject worth exploring in future research in embodied interaction with sound.
5.6 Chapter Summary
This chapter presented a general discussion of the results obtained by this research. It started by answering the core questions and then discussing the sound-centred
approach and answering the methodological questions. I then presented and discussed the four main contributions of this research, consisting of the concept of Retro-Active Listening, the Sonic Incident technique, the Gestural Sound Toolkit and three models of embodied sonic interactions. I concluded this chapter by suggesting a possible line of further research in the field of Sonic Interaction Design. The next chapter concludes this thesis and will focus on more general considerations of my research and ideas for future work.