The first research question posed at the beginning of this thesis asked: • Q1: What is the sonic in Sonic Interaction Design?
The rationale for this question was to explore different forms of the concept of "sonic" in Sonic Interaction Design research and provide us with insights into opportunities to explore.
The pilot study on gestural sonic affordances exemplified how we may explore the "sonic" through embodied interactive technologies, alongside the help of participants. By using a gestural-sound mapping in real time and miniaturised sensing technologies, we adopted a classical approach to Sonic Interaction Design in terms of typology of user study based on auditory stimuli and study of perception, in order to find relationships between participants' movements and digital sound feedback. As already noted, the principal feature of this study was the strategy of reducing the technological component of the interaction so that the influence of physical characteristics was minimal. This strategy allowed us to identify action-sound relationships that were not particularly dependant on the physical aspects of the control device. Participants' associative and morphological descriptions of sound revealed that sound entails a tension between its acoustic and physical aspects, and their cultural, everyday and situated qualities. These need to be considered in the design of embodied interactions with sound, deepening our knowledge of "sonic" in Sonic Interaction Design.
The Form Follows Sound workshops helped us to explore the intimate and private dimensions of participants' sonic experience. This helped us to focus our attention towards other ways in which sound can be engaged in Sonic Interaction Design, drawing upon memories and imagination. By investigating methods in which we can reimagine ourselves listening to a private and particular sound of the past, we
developed methods such as the Sonic Incident technique, which enabled participants to be more sensitised and attuned to the sonic dimension of their life. This form of engagement with a wider dimension of the sonic, through techniques exploiting imagination and memory, can help us to imagine further ways in which, as SID researchers, we can adventure into richer deployments of the concept of the sonic.
The literature review of SID helped us to trace a general map of the sonic in this specific field of research. With her statement about Sonic Interaction Design, Franinović suggests the importance of exploring the complexity of sound as a spectrum of experience rather than a ‘pure’ phenomenon of audible vibration. Despite this, the research reviewed in SID has focused mainly on a consideration of sound as a form of acoustic feedback for aiding users’ interaction with devices, utilising sound in a way which is centred around the idea of a ‘pure’, acoustical phenomenon. In Chapter 2, I reviewed current practices of SID. This showed how, for Rocchesso, SID offers “a privileged framework” for design practices which exploit links between sound perception and continuous interactions with embodied interfaces (Rocchesso et al. 2008). User studies on continuous motor interaction with sound playback, such as the Spinotron (Lemaitre et al. 2009), have at their core of investigation this idea of manipulating digital sound feedback through human movement – and vice versa – mediated by interactive technologies. The basis of this interaction is a mapping between the parameters of a sound synthesis engine – which cause sound to change – to the speed and energy of human movement manipulating an object. Other works reviewed in Chapter 2, such as the Flo)(ps or Polotti’s Gamelunch, show how this mapping between digital sound feedback and continuous human movement generated a rethinking of habitual interactions aided by a form of “circuit bent sonic feedback” (Polotti et al. 2008). The examples of research in Sonic Interaction Design conducted in Chapter 2 show a use of sound that is primarily conveyed through digital sound feedback, played back in real time. This feedback was associated with the physical manipulation of interactive devices to improve or affect the performances of task-oriented activities or performative scenarios. This consideration of sound in SID illustrates one way in which the action-sound perception loop can be exploited, consisting of a conception of sound as a design medium that can facilitate human movements, such as manipulation, rotation, pushing and other actions.
In such cases, the word “sonic” in SID appears to be a statement regarding the presence of sound and vibration in processes of designing interactions by relating aspects of continuous interaction, body movement and technology. Although this is one the biggest advantages of designed sound as an effective medium for facilitating particular human movements thanks to its strong feedback component, the sole consideration of sound as feedback in SID poses some limitations. The problem with this idea of sound is that it has the risk of limiting the scope of Sonic Interaction Design exclusively to the presence of sound during the interaction, leaving unexplored the richness of sonic experience and the knowledge we can gather from exploiting human sensitivity to sound, including listening experience, memories and embodied imagery of sound.
To address this limitation, and build upon Franinović’s idea of experience of Sonic Interaction Design, we looked to a different concept of “sonic” that could inform the research field, researching different literature and practices, including Auditory Culture, Sound Studies, Acoustic Ecology and Embodied Cognition. This opened up ways to frame the discussion of sound beyond a focus on auditory perception and psychoacoustics, considering experiential, extra-auditory approaches to sound too.
By looking at a phenomenological approach to the bodily experience of sound, such as in Ingold’s concept of “ensounding” as an immersion in the medium of sound (Ingold 2011) or Henriques’ “sonic dominance” (2003), we found an angle to investigate participatory, bodily involvement with sound that includes not only hearing sound but also the possibility of listening to it and thinking about it. The concepts of “ensounding” and “sonic dominance” offer us an important consideration of sound in relation to the potential experience of the listener, describing sound not as an object, as something that we hear, but as Ingold wrote “we hear in”(Ingold 2011, p.138). This consideration of sound is useful to expand the concept of the sonic in SID, to include psychological perspectives of other aspects of sonic experience, such as listening or remembering actions associated with sound. Acoustic Ecology illuminated how listening is important in the process of making sense of biological activities, in particular geographical places, and therefore gives a sense of their context. Godøy and Leman’s work on cognitive studies of music and sound links an embodied relationship between sound perception with the actions we imagine and perform with our body. The
triangulation between these research practices offers an understanding of sound that entails a consideration of “sonic” which includes both contextual and phenomenological aspects of our everyday sonic experience, illuminating concepts such as our “ensounded” condition - our immersion into the medium of sound, rather than considering it as an object – which affords a sense of place and memory. This sense of place and memory in providing case studies for sonic experience has been actively explored in this research through the use of the Sonic Incident technique and the activities of the Form Follows Sound workshops.