Interactive Sound Installations Database
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Summary
The project compiles a database of various interactive sound installations described in the academic literature in the past 50 years. It's intended for sound and multimedia artists, designers, or researchers and students looking for design precedent, inspiration, or an overview of trends in the field.
A main outcome of the project is a web app including two visualization tools to navigate the database:
- a dynamic sunburst chart to navigate across categories and subcategories of installations and generate lists of installations that share similar characteristics; and
- a network graph to visualize the relationships between installations, and to identify clusters of installations that share similar characteristics.
Ojectives
Create a comprehensive and centralized database of interactive sound installations for design precedent.- Establish a framework to describe, analyze, and document installations across three perspectives: Artistic Intention, Interaction, and System Design.
- Educational tool for getting an overview of the artworks and their design.
- Identify trends in the field, including research or literature gaps.
Timeline
2020
Status: ongoing
Approach
A corpus of several hundred interactive sound installations was reviewed in the academic literature to derive a taxonomy describing them across three perspectives, subdivided across more than a hundred categories. The taxonomy was elaborated both deductively from existing frameworks for musical interfaces and interactive sound installations, and inductively from observations from the corpus. The sunburst and network visualizations are complementary, the former allowing to retrieve lists of installations associated to specific features while the later allows to identify share features across installations.
Outcomes & Impact
The database and associated taxonomy provide a comprehensive conceptual framework for assessing current and past installation design practices. The visualizations provide an intuitive tool to navigate the database, allowing users to easily identify trends and retrieve documentation. This should prove useful for sound and multimedia artists, designers, researchers, and students interested in the field.
People involved
- Valérian Fraisse, McGill University (Music Technology)*
- Clémentine Berger, McGill University (Music Technology, former member)*
- Marcelo M. Wanderley, McGill University (Music Technology)*
- Catherine Guastavino, McGill University (Information Studies)*
Partners
- CIRMMT
- Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory (IDMIL)
- Multimodal Interaction Laboratory (MIL)
Granting Agencies / Funding Sponsors
- NSERC
- FRQ-NT
Resources
Publications
- Fraisse, V., Wanderley, M. M., & Guastavino, C. (2021). Comprehensive Framework for Describing Interactive Sound Installations: Highlighting Trends through a Systematic Review. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 5(4), 19. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti5040019
- Fraisse, V., Guastavino, C., & Wanderley, M. M. (2021). A Visualization Tool to Explore Interactive Sound Installations. International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.4fd9089c
Keywords
Interactive sound installations; web app; systematic review; new interfaces for musical expression; sonic interaction design
Opportunities for engagement
There are plenty of avenues to contribute to this project, especially to expand the database and include more recent installations as well as artworks reported outside of the academic literature (such as artist statements, museum archives, press, etc.). Other directions for improvement include adding a geographic visualization, and audio/video excerpts when available. If you would like to contribute, feel free to reach out!