Drive-By Workshop
Augmented Auditory Objects
You've heard of Augmented Reality, the increasingly popular technology which presents additional information to you about your environment through the use of visual overlays on camera-equipped phones. But our realities are also full of sound, sound that can be digitally augmented to communicate information and create feelings. What kinds of information about our surroundings can be communicated to us by modifying the sounds made by common objects that we interact with? This is the question addressed in the practice of Auditory Augmentation. With a little knowledge of sonification (the practice of turning data, such as the current weather forecast, into sound), researchers have been developing intriguing ways of unobtrusively altering the sounds of our every-day lives to provide information about our environment. How can this research be used to create meaning in an artistic context? How can we change the sounds objects make in order to create subtle feelings and communicate complex ideas? These are the questions we will explore in this workshop.
Topics we will cover include:
- Theoretical overview of artistic research in tangible auditory interfaces
- Sonification of natural phenomena and environmental data
- Auditory augmentation of objects using microphones and sound processing
- Artistic exploration of these ideas
