Stephen Barrass

Sonification Design Patterns
Most product designers have little or no experience with sonifications. Designers from a range of different domains use a common method called Design Patterns to describe "solutions to problems in context" in a way that can be readily understood and reused. Design Patterns may provide a way to communicate sonification research results with product designers and other design communities. I have written a handful of prototype Sonification Design Patterns from papers in the ICAD 2002 proceedings. The papers I selected had clear statements of hypotheses, results to support them, and repeated examples elsewhere in the proceedings. These Patterns are now on the SonificationDesignPatterns site on the WikiWeb and can be edited and added to using any internet browser. The lively development of SonificationDesignPatterns by the ICAD community may help build sonification-specific vocabulary, identify sonification hypotheses, and allow product designers to pick up and apply our research.


Tecumseh Fitch

Communicating with sound: An ethological perspective
Due to the high density and importance of speech in most workplaces, practical sonification systems should be designed to complement and synergize with, rather than compete with, language. The multiple-message, high-dimensional channel of voice quality (such as prosody in speech, and similar communication systems in animals) is held out as one way of acheiving such synergy. Systems that exploit the vocal channel can run, and be interpreted, in parallel with speech and require little training to learn. I will present some examples of biological sounds, full of acoustic parameters ready for appropriate interpretation by humans, and with an available bandwidth more than adequate for many practical sonficiation applications. These span the biological spectrum from frogs to dogs and birds. I will briefly discuss the principles underlying vertebrate vocal production and how they can be modeled in silico. While pitch can be useful, timbre is argued to be more flexible and multidimensional for sonification purposes. The example of formant frequencies as cues to individuality and size, and variability as an indication of urgency, are given as examples. Temporal cues, particularly rhythm, provide a rich and structured multidimensional channel that can be easily implemented vocally. Physical models of vocal production systems, of animals, real or imagined, provied a rich framework for exploration in sonification. And they are fun.


Jay Rose

Reality (Sound)bites: Audio Tricks from the Film and TV Studio
What you hear is rarely what a project started with. In this example-filled session, we'll look at some of the ways sound designers fix -- or sometimes, break -- voices, music, and effects to help serve a director's vision. We'll start with how phoneme-level editing can change a dialect or merge one voice with a completely different one. Then we'll move to studio processing to change the harmonic structure of a recording, make sounds bigger or smaller without changing their peak volume, and create strange auras around a voice. Finally we'll examine how basic cookbook audio processes such as delays and equalizers are strung together in unusual ways, to simulate everything from an airplane interior to the sound of a classroom movie projector. Jay Rose CAS is a Clio- and Emmy-winning sound designer whose clients have included CBS, PBS, Buena Vista, and national cable networks. He has written two books on sound for video, both currently category best-sellers at Amazon.com, and close to a hundred magazine articles about the subject. He also designed the special effects in Eventide's DSP4000B series of audio processors, used in film and broadcast studios around the world. Rose is a member of the Cinema Audio Society and Audio Engineering Society.


Gregory Wakefield

Abstract Coming Soon!


Bev Wright

Abstract Coming Soon!