Category: Research

Musicking Artifact Tubularium was the first exploration of the PhD project by Lucia Montesinos Garcia. Tubularium is a tangible music interface designed to support non-musicians in music making. Tubularium was designed following a Research-through-Design methodology to enquire into how to design a human-sized tangible interface that could allow participants without any musical skills to make music, facilitate enough agency so that participants feel like they are making music, and overall provide an aesthetic experience. This resulted in a set of 7 acrylic pipes, each 110 centimeters tall, arranged in a line. Each of the pipes contains a LED light and is divided into three…

Listening to Inner Sound (working title) is an artistic research project exploring how inner voices, thoughts and fragmented auditory experiences can be externalised through spatial sound environments. Through different methods of listening, recording and sonic transformation, the project investigates how subjective sonic experiences can become perceptible, materialised and open to further exploration through sound. Working across sound art, spatial audio and affective interaction research, the project draws on voice and personal sound archives, including recordings, sonic memories and fragments collected by the artist and research participants. These materials are explored through granular processing and interactive installations to investigate relations between inner experience, listening and perception.…

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…