Sketching Sonic Interaction Design

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

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

Posted by michal under Applications, Just fun, Voice

Funny Funny:

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!