Sketching Sonic Interaction Design
SID Workshop at HIT, Holon Institute of Technology, Israel
23rd
OCT
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!
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October 23, 2009 -
Meet the people, Sketching, Voice -
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The voice is a great tool for sound making indeed, I recommend to have a look at Michael Winslow (yes, the Human Beat Box from Police Academy.. 😉 ) on youtube.. 🙂
The more I consider it, however, the more I wonder if the “sketching” – metaphor is really suitable to the medium of sound… Sketching relies on abstraction, outline, reduction etc. All these things, in the sonic domain, very often are either impossible or create entirely different sounds.
Also I think there are indeed some established design methods for sounds, otherwise there would not be so many great sound desings around.. At least in music production and film, the design processes are pretty much standardized. The main challenge from my point of view is to integrate the sound design process with the interaction design process!
What you say about the non validity of the Sketching metaphor is very interesting! Perhaps improvisation is a relevant word?