Sketching Sonic Interaction Design

Sonosketch – Querying sound databases by drawing

Posted by michal under SID

Jordi sent me this and prompted me to return to this forlorn blog… thanks Jordi!

Sonosketch, from the University of Applied Sciences, Bremen.

hope to continue with this blog sometime soon, with the long-overdue report on the Sketching workshop, and more.

Honda Choir

Posted by michal under SID

Some more voice acrobatics (thanks, Inger!)

New to Sonic Interaction Design?

Posted by michal under Experiments, Meet the people, SID

Shoogle is one of my personal favorites in this field. Created by fellow SID-ers John Williamson and Rod Murray-Smith, with Stephen Hughes, at the Dynamics and Interaction Group, Glasgow University, Shoogle “is a novel, intuitive interface for sensing data within a mobile device”.
A great exploration of audio-tactile interaction. Take a look:

Converting text to sound & smoke

Posted by Avi Ashkenazi under Experiments, Just fun, Voice

Designed by Iranian-born artist Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel, with participation of Matthew Brackett. In this work, titled “Smoke and Hot Air”, the system searches for sentences including the words “attack Iran” on Google News. The sentences go through a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is in turn picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of wooden smoke ring makers.

Watch the movie here

Michael Winslow making car noises

Posted by michal under SID

Following Daniel Hug’s comment, here’s a master of the voice:

Sonar Power Manager

Posted by Avi Ashkenazi under SID

Not at all related to sketching, but clever: the Sonar Power Manager uses a new user presence detection technique to shut off the computer display when you are not present. It was developed by researchers at Northwestern and UMichigan. The goal is to shut off the screen immediately after you leave, even if you just moved the mouse 10 seconds ago.

Sketching and Experience Design – Buxton

Posted by michal under Sketching

Buxton’s influential book on Sketching made such an impact in the User experience community that some have labeled 2008 the “Year of the Sketch”. Though prototyping user experiences has been a topic of interest for a long time, Buxton managed to bring this topic to a wider audience, as well as to contextualize it within other forms of sketching in the design world and design history.

Anyway… got an extra 90 minutes?
Watch Bill Buxton in a somewhat unfocused presentation in Stanford on “Sketching and Experience Design”.

“I am T-Pain” and Obama’s health care plan

Posted by michal under Applications, Just fun, Voice

Funny Funny:

Interview with Itay Talgam

Posted by admin under Meet the people

Itay Talgam is an orchestra conductor who uses his experiences with orchestras to work with organizations on leadership and collaboration. In the SID workshop he will talking about collaboration using sound. In this, slightly off-topic interview, he talks about why he likes working with non-musicians. Take a look:

Inger Ekman’s thoughts on sonic sketching

Posted by admin under Meet the people, Sketching, Voice

Inger Ekman will be attending the workshop and co-hosting the vocal sketching session.
Here are some thoughts she posted on her blog, about the workshop and about sonic sketching:

“What does sonic sketching mean, then? Well, I suspect a part of this workshop will be precisely finding out that. As of now, there really is no established design methodology for working with sound, especially in the prototyping stage. Sound doesn’t have its storyboards, or paper prototypes.

What I use a lot, however, is the voice. There are really so many awesome things you can do with your voice, even without that much training. But with a little training, and a huge amount of self-confidence, the voice can become a very useful prototyping tool. Foreign languages, for example, are a great way to learn to make new sounds. How about these Xhosa sounds for a starter? And if you train a little (or a lot) more, you can do quite a lot just with your voice. Just listen to this lovely Pink Panther theme by Bobby McFerrin. Or how about a little polyharmonic singing – yeah, thats when you sing two tones at the same time. So how about using this cool device of ours for vocal prototyping?

Having worked with different experience prototyping methods in the past, I’ve always felt there is a special tug in people’s stomachs whenever they start prototyping something that sounds. The voice is just so personal! Working to overcome these comfort barriers, both by myself personally and together with other designers, research colleagues, and students, has been quite interesting! I guess being an extrovert really helps in a field like this.”

Cool. We look forward to seeing you here, Inger!