Concert Call for Sonifications
| Date | 2004-02-20 12:21 |
| From | "Guillaume Potard" |
| Subject | Concert Call for Sonifications |
|
sorry for the
shameless spamming ;) all the infos on http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD2004/concert.htm cheers! CONCERT CALL FOR SONIFICATIONS Listening to the Mind Listening Concert of Sonifications at the Sydney Opera House The Listening to the Mind Listening Concert will be held at the Sydney Opera House as part of the International Conference on Auditory Display ICAD2004 in Sydney from 6-9 July 2004 www.icad.org/icad2004. The music in the concert will be sonifications composed from the neural activity of a person listening to a piece of music. Sonification is the mapping of data into sounds for some purpose. A data set containing a recording of neural activity is available for download from the ICAD website as described in the Data section of this call. This is an invitation for you to submit a sonification of this data for the concert. Submissions are open to everyone. Ten of the submitted sonifications will be selected for the concert, an audio CD and accompanying booklet. The concert will be presented by the Sydney Opera House Studio and promoted to the general public http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/thestudio. Motivation In his acceptance speech for the 1981 Nobel Prize for Medicine, David Hubel describes how the sound of a neuron firing led to his first important discovery. "Our first real discovery came as a surprise. We had been doing experiments for about a month . and were not getting very far. One day we made an especially stable recording. For 3 or 4 hours we got absolutely nowhere. Then we began to elicit some vague and inconsistent responses by stimulating somewhere in the mid-periphery of the retina. We were inserting the glass slide with its black spot into the slot of the ophthalmoscope when suddenly over the audiomonitor the cell went off like a machine gun. After some fussing and fiddling we found out what was happening. The response had nothing to do with the black dot. As the glass slide was inserted its edge was casting onto the retina a faint but sharp shadow, a straight dark line on a light background. That was what the cell wanted, and it wanted it, moreover, in just one narrow range of orientations." http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1981/ Listening to the Mind Listening is a development of the technique of listening to neurons, but we will extend it to explore the neural activity of the entire brain. The goals of the concert are to explore the idea that people can understand information from sonifications stimulate a new aesthetic of form and function in sound blur and cross the boundaries between sonification and music compare and contrast sonification designs and techniques investigate the listening activity of the mind using sounds instead of graphs Constraints The concert is an investigation on the boundary of art and science. The sonifications need to be musically satisfying for a general audience, scientifically interesting to neuroscientists, and help develop design knowledge in the auditory display community. In order to open up artistic possibilities, whilst at the same time providing for comparison and analysis, we are imposing some simple constraints for the sonifications. Data-driven. Sonification is a mapping of data into sounds for some purpose. The sonification should be the result of an explicit mapping from the data into sounds. The listener should be able to understand relations and structures in the data from the sonification. Time is the binding. The timeline of the data must map directly to the timeline of the sonification. All other mapping decisions are completely open but we need to be able to compare pieces across time, and also compare them with the original data set and source piece of music. This means that the final sonification pieces will all be exactly the same duration as the data set, and original piece of music. Reproducibility. The mapping of the data into sound must be described in a manner than can be reproduced by others. Mappings should be described explicitly. Different mappings will enable different perceptions of information in the data. The experiment should lay a foundation for scientific and aesthetic observations and ongoing development by the research community. |