Research on Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) has highlighted the need for participatory design methods, i.e., to actively include users as co-designers and informants in the design process. However, very little work has explored how pre-verbal children with Profound and Multiple Disabilities (PMLD) can be involved in such processes. In this paper, we apply in-depth qualitative and mixed methodologies in a case study with four students with PMLD. Using Participatory Design with Proxies (PDwP), we assess how these students can be involved in the customization and evaluation of the design of a multisensory music experience intended for a large-scale ADMI. Results from an experiment focused on communication of musical haptics highlighted the diversity in employed interaction strategies used by the children, accessibility limitations of the current multisensory experience design, and the importance of using a multifaceted variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to arrive at more informed conclusions when applying a design with proxies methodology.
This paper presents three studies where we probe aesthetics strategies of sound produced by movement sonification of a Pepper robot by mapping its movements to sound models. We developed two sets of sound models. The first set was made by two sound models, a sawtooth-based one and another based on feedback chains, for investigating how the perception of synthesized robot sounds would depend on their design complexity. We implemented the second set of sound models for probing the “materiality” of sound made by a robot in motion. This set consisted of a sound synthesis based on an engine highlighting the robot’s internal mechanisms, a metallic sound synthesis highlighting the robot’s typical appearance, and a whoosh sound synthesis highlighting the movement. We conducted three studies. The first study explores how the first set of sound models can influence the perception of expressive gestures of a Pepper robot through an online survey. In the second study, we carried out an experiment in a museum installation with a Pepper robot presented in two scenarios: (1) while welcoming patrons into a restaurant and (2) while providing information to visitors in a shopping center. Finally, in the third study, we conducted an online survey with stimuli similar to those used in the second study. Our findings suggest that participants preferred more complex sound models for the sonification of robot movements. Concerning the materiality, participants liked better subtle sounds that blend well with the ambient sound (i.e., less distracting) and soundscapes in which sound sources can be identified. Also, sound preferences varied depending on the context in which participants experienced the robot-generated sounds (e.g., as a live museum installation vs. an online display).
Software is intangible, invisible, and at the same time pervasive in everyday devices, activities, and services accompanying our life. Therefore, citizens hardly realize its complexity, power, and impact in many aspects of their daily life. In this study, we report on one experiment that aims at letting citizens make sense of software presence and activity in their everyday lives, through sound: the invisible complexity of the processes involved in the shutdown of a personal computer. We used sonification to map information embedded in software events into the sound domain. The software events involved in a shutdown have names related to the physical world and its actions: write events (information is saved into digital memories), kill events (running processes are terminated), and exit events (running programs are exited). The research study presented in this article has a “double character.” It is an artistic realization that develops specific aesthetic choices, and it has also pedagogical purposes informing the causal listener about the complexity of software behavior. Two different sound design strategies have been applied: one strategy is influenced by the sonic characteristics of the Glitch music scene, which makes deliberate use of glitch-based sound materials, distortions, aliasing, quantization noise, and all the “failures” of digital technologies; and a second strategy based on the sound samples of a subcontrabass Paetzold recorder, an unusual and special acoustic instrument which unique sound has been investigated in the contemporary art music scene. Analysis of quantitative ratings and qualitative comments of 37 participants revealed that the sound design strategies succeeded in communicating the nature of the computer processes. Participants also showed in general an appreciation of the aesthetics of the peculiar sound models used in this study.
Study in three phases is an adaptive site-specific sound installation that includes 22 solenoids placed on metallic arches that surround visitors and react to environmental perturbations, creating a self-regulating soundscape of metallic hits that serves to renew the visitors’ acoustic perspective. Adaptivity is a crucial aspect of the work: Similar perturbations will not generally cause similar reactions from the installation based on past interactions, thus allowing evolution over time to play a key role artistically and technically. This article discusses the author's position on adaptivity in music interaction and composition and reports on the technical and artistic aspects of the installation.
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