There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Psychoacoustics—facts and models

Biotechnology: Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

Published evidence for the role of participatory art in supporting health and well‐being is growing. The Arts on Prescription model is one vehicle by which participatory art can be delivered. Much of the focus of Arts on Prescription has been on the provision of creative activities for people with mental health needs. This Arts on Prescription program, however, targeted community‐dwelling older people with a wide range of health and wellness needs. Older people were referred to the program by their healthcare practitioner. 

Professional artists led courses in visual arts, photography, dance and movement, drama, singing, or music. Classes were held weekly for 8–10 weeks, with six to eight participants per class, and culminated with a showing of work or a performance. Program evaluation involved pre‐ and postcourse questionnaires, and focus groups and individual interviews. Evaluation data on 127 participants aged 65 years and older were available for analysis. We found that Arts on Prescription had a positive impact on participants. 

Quantitative findings revealed a statistically significant improvement	in the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well‐being	Scale(WEMWBS) as	well	as a statistically significant increase in the level of self‐reported creativity and frequency of creative activities. 

Qualitative findings indicated that the program provided challenging artistic activities which created a sense of purpose and direction, enabled personal growth and achievement, and empowered participants, in a setting which fostered the development of meaningful relationships with others. 

This evaluation adds to the evidence base in support of Arts on Prescription by expanding the application of the model to older people with a diverse range of health and wellness needs.

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Arts on prescription for community-dwelling older people with a range of health and wellness needs.

Psychoacoustical models provide algorithmic methods of estimating the perceptual sensation that will be caused by a given sound stimulus. Four primary psychoacoustical models are most often used: ‘loudness’, ‘sharpness’, ‘roughness’, and ‘fluctuation strength’, models for which have been presented by Zwicker and Fastl [1]. These four models have been used extensively for optimising product sound quality in industrial sound design applications. However, they also may be applied for auditory display purposes. This paper presents a method for their application and discusses effects and implications of using this method for designing auditory displays. This paper is primarily theoretical ‐ however, sound examples of auditory graphing based on psychoacoustical models will be presented at the conference for discussion.

/pdf/using-psychoacoustical-models-for-information-sonification-10pk9qa0z9.pdf

Using psychoacoustical models for information sonification

Sonification is an emerging modality of information representation, the auditory equivalent of visualization employing non-speech sound to display attributes of form, pattern, recurrence and trends in abstract data. Like data-art or visual and auditory art-forms driven by data content directly mapped to their rendering, sonification shares the goal of aesthetic representation (auditory graphing) in a way to better and more accessibly convey the message to broader consumer audiences. Often, the simple re-contextualization of dense abstract data in an auditory graph (or sonification) is sufficient to highlight long-term trends, to hear regularities (patterns) and anomalies in periodicity of time-series data and to assimilate very subtle and fine transformations. Sonification is also optimal for certain working or ambient situations that are visually rich or visually saturated, when we seek to command topical and peripheral attention with relevant cues. Auditory display is also an alternative to visualization for people with visual impairments. Exploring the premise that sonification should be both aesthetic and informative, i.e. listenable, attractive and engaging, this paper summarises the findings of 3 experiments conducted to determine ways to better represent and access dense information mapped on to more than one concurrent stream of information. Specifically, we show evidence that spatialization of informative events coinciding in time can be more clearly distinguished and that timbre (or tone colour / tone quality) characteristics can serve to further reinforce spatial and stream separation. These findings combine to develop comprehensible methods for representing complex data-sets. We consider human cognition, auditory perception and audio reproduction technologies that each influence the ability to display information sonically.

Aesthetic and auditory enhancements for multi-stream information sonification

This paper describes the interface design of our AeSon (Aesthetic Sonification) Toolkit motivated by user-centred customisation of the aesthetic representation and scope of the data. The interface design is developed from 3 premises that distinguish our approach from more ubiquitous sonification methodologies. Firstly, we prioritise interaction both from the perspective of changing scale, scope and presentation of the data and the user's ability to reconfigure spatial panning, modality, pitch distribution, critical thresholds and granularity of data examined. The user, for the majority of parameters, determines their own listening experience for real-time data sonification, even to the extent that the interface can be used for live data-driven performance, as well as traditional information analysis and examination. Secondly, we have explored the theories of Tufte, Fry and other visualization and information design experts to find ways in which principles that are successful in the field of information visualization may be translated to the domain of sonification. Thirdly, we prioritise aesthetic variables and controls in the interface, derived from musical practice, aesthetics in information design and responses to experimental user evaluations to inform the design of the sounds and display. In addition to using notions of meter, beat, key or modality and emphasis drawn from music, we draw on our experiments that evaluated the effects of spatial separation in multivariate data presentations.

/pdf/an-interface-and-framework-design-for-interactive-aesthetic-439d3vqf54.pdf

An Interface and Framework Design for Interactive Aesthetic Sonification

Maturation of network technologies and high-speed broadband has led to significant developments in multi-user platforms that enable synchronous networked improvisation across global distances. However sophisticated the interface, nuances of face-to-face communication such as gesture, facial expression, and body language are not available to the remote improviser. Sound artists and musicians must rely on listening and the semiotics of sound to mediate their interaction and the resulting collaboration. This paper examines two case studies of networked improvisatory performances by the inter-cultural tele-music ensemble Ethernet Orchestra.It focuses on qualities of sound (e.g. timbre, frequency, amplitude) in the group's networked improvisation, examining how they become arbiters of meaning in dialogical musical interactions without visual gestural signifiers. The evaluation is achieved through a framework of Distributed Cognition, highlighting the centrality of culture, artefact and environment in the analysis of dispersed musical perception. It contrasts salient qualities of sound in the groups' collective improvisation, highlighting the interpretive challenges for cross-cultural musicians in a real-time 'jam' session. As network technologies provide unprecedented opportunities for diverse inter-cultural collaboration, it is sound as the carrier of meaning that mediates these new experiences.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1355771811000471

Kirsty Beilharz

Papers

Arts on prescription for community-dwelling older people with a range of health and wellness needs.

Using psychoacoustical models for information sonification

Aesthetic and auditory enhancements for multi-stream information sonification

An Interface and Framework Design for Interactive Aesthetic Sonification

Listening through the firewall: Semiotics of sound in networked improvisation