Category: Research

AI in smart devices is having a huge impact on the world’s energy consumption, which again is having a huge negative impact on climate change. How does AI feel about its role and pervasive influence on climate change? Is it possible for intelligent technology to influence its interluctor and make them more aware of issues such as pollution and climate change? What influence does the sound and speech of the smart devices have on its subject? These are some of the questions that Climate Change Smart Speakers might help to answer. A probe study and part of the research project “Vocal…

MoSS (Modular Smart Speaker) combines the interactive voice control of a smart speaker with the playful hands-on interaction of a modular synthesizer. The modularity of the hybrid, both in hardware and software, makes it possible to patch together a wide variety of speech synthesis and audio processing tools to explore new sonic territory in the context of speech synthesis. Rather than being a passive recipient of a set vocality, users can interact and explore the vocal expressions and voice qualities as an interactive, aesthetic and playable part of the smart speaker device; an engagement, which might lead to changes in our…

A blog post by Laura Winkler Moreno Twose I had the privilege of participating in this year's ACM Summer School on Accessible and Inclusive Technologies, hosted in Milan, Italy. This year's edition marked the third time the summer school has been held. It brought together researchers and students from around the world to share their perspectives on developing technologies that promote accessibility and inclusion for people with diverse disabilities. The summer school featured keynote talks and a hands-on workshop, where we worked together in interdisciplinary groups, combining our different areas of expertise to address different cases before…

   The Avenue of Sound is a research through art and design project designed and performed by guest artist and researcher Steen Lund Holbek. The installation consists of two parallel sound walls — each 7 meters long and 2 meters high — built from 32 mismatched loudspeakers powered by 16 equally idiosyncratic hi-fi amplifiers. Positioned four meters apart, the speaker walls form a corridor through which visitors are invited to walk, linger, and listen. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the installation unfolds as an exploratory field of microvariations and distributed intensities. Visitors shape their own embodied listening experience by moving…

 Embodied Musical Mediation Apparatus EMMA is an interactive sonic interface for embodied and social interaction. Developed as a hexagonal sound sculpture, the project invites multiple participants to engage with sound through bodily movement, spatial proximity, and shared attention. Each side of the sculpture is equipped with a distance sensor that responds to the presence and motion of a participant, shaping musical behavior in real time through an embedded synthesis system. While EMMA can be engaged by a single participant, it is fundamentally designed for multi-participant interaction: as more people enter the system, more voices, zones, and pattern combinations become available, allowing the music to…

Breathe Kritisk is a fictional rehabilitation machine. It does not cure any physical symptoms, but it may cure deep-rooted beliefs that we have about the control between medical devices and one’s body. The machine stands as a two-meter-tall chamber with two air pillows inside. The visitor can inflate and deflate the air pillows through the breathing sensor, which sometimes complies with and other times manipulates the visitor’s breath. This work aims to provoke visitors to reflect upon control which patients grapple with and lose in medical settings and to technological devices. The design stems from medical humanities, which focuses on subjective and invisible experiences in…

UDREDNING ("Diagnosing") is an MR (mixed reality) audiovisual installation based on diaries, social media entries, and interviews with parents who have kids who are either in a diagnosing process or who recently have been through one. In the project, we try to express what it means to be a parent to a child going through the process of a rare disease diagnosis. There are around 800 known rare disease diagnoses, and for a disease to be rare only 1-2 persons for every 10.000 persons can be diagnosed with it. When you are the parent of a child being diagnosed due to developmental delays, medical events,…