Continuing a trend of publications investigating sound art within a specific geographical context, this paper proposes an original view of the sound installation practice in Québec. This study is part of a research project aiming at building new theoretical and practical tools for the documentation of such artworks. In this paper we present the outcomes of the first phase and its connection with the bigger picture of the project, which is the questioning of the relevance of spatial audio recordings with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for mediating the capture of knowledge relating to the sensory experience of a work. During the first phase, we developed a conceptual descriptive framework based on a mixed-methods approach, top-down and bottom-up, consisting in a systematic review of literature paralleled with a categorization of contemporary sound art production in Québec based on publicly available documentation. This process led to a formal and quantitative depiction of the Québec scene, which aims to guide both the selection of case studies for the next phases but also to be part of the conceptual tools for investigating the sensory experience of these works. This quantitative depiction of the scene will thus foster a qualitative investigation of the sensory experience of sound art installations and the knowledge that may be lost in standard written documentation practice with an original methodological framework.
We report on a conceptual framework for describing interactive sound installations from three complementary perspectives: artistic intention, interaction and system design. Its elaboration was informed by a systematic review of 181 peer-reviewed publications retrieved from the Scopus database, which describe 195 interactive sound installations. The resulting taxonomy is based on the comparison of the different facets of the installations reported in the literature and on existing frameworks, and it was used to characterize all publications. A visualization tool was developed to explore the different facets and identify trends and gaps in the literature. The main findings are presented in terms of bibliometric analysis, and from the three perspectives considered. Various trends were derived from the database, among which we found that interactive sound installations are of prominent interest in the field of computer science. Furthermore, most installations described in the corpus consist of prototypes or belong to exhibitions, output two sensory modalities and include three or more sound sources. Beyond the trends, this review highlights a wide range of practices and a great variety of approaches to the design of interactive sound installations.
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