Interactional Sound and Music

Interactional - capable of acting on or influencing each other

The Interactional Sound and Music group in the Centre for Digital Music explores new ways of encountering sound from interactive art to real time data sonification.

We ask questions such as: How do we design and create engaging interactive soundscapes? What encourages collective action with, and through sound? Does music make the world go round? Can data be sonified beautifully and intuitively? How can algorithms improvise with us in real-time? What do people understand of our new forms of musical expression. How does technology change the music making process? Can we sense the imperceptible? What do diagrams sound like?

In order to address these questions we use techniques and models ranging from artistic intervention to controlled experiments, from ethnographic studies and discourse analysis to distributed cognition. We use tools from Max/MSP to SuperCollider and Java.

The group is led by Nick Bryan-Kinns who focuses on design and evaluation of collectively engaging sound experiences. Projects in the area include:

• Interactive real-time musical systems
• Musical audio analysis for real-time interaction
• Sonic Visualiser
• Real-time analysis of voice for musical applications
• Automatic mixing tools for audio and music production
• Watermark Embedding in MPEG2 bit-stream
• Interaction design for musical composition
• Visualizing structured data about music
• Auditory graphs and interfaces for cross modal collaborative analysis of data
• Auditory overviews
• Spatialised sound composition
• Collaborative auditory displays and sonification
• Interactive soundscapes
• Computational modelling of perceptual mechanisms
• Understanding collaborative music making
• Automated composition
• Interactive data sonification, audio games, methods for designing and evaluating auditory displays

As part of the Centre for Digital Music Platform grant we have funded commissions on interactive sound including the (re)Actor3 C4DM commission which explored the interaction of pianos, algorithms, physical intervention, and performance.

Take a look at C4DM Presents which showcases interactive sound installations carried out by researchers, including The Giant Instrument.

Key conferences and networks in the area include:

• New Interfaces for Musical Expression
• International Computer Music Conference
• ACM Creativity and Cognition
• (re)Actor
• ICAD
• DMRN
• DAFX