SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for auditory enrichment
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- Animals have evolved forms of communication that work in a species-specific environmental context – gestures that can be observed from a range of distances, olfactory cues that can be “posted” and remain until they dissipate, vocalisations and other acoustic signals that act immediately but in some cases with great range, enabling remote contact with conspecifics.
- Without humans contributing to the Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
- As human populations expand over the globe, these “natural-sounding” places are slowly disappearing.
- It follows that if a social species is housed independently or with a smaller number of conspecifics than would naturally occur in the wild, it is possible that their acoustic repertoire will be diminished, along with the cognitive processing required to discriminate between a range of sounds.
Motivation
- Animals living in manmade environments may need protecting from anthropophonic noise.
- Many examples of auditory enrichment involve keepers (and researchers) selecting and playing sounds to the animals in their care.
- Suspended straw Asian elephant family browsing at Dublin Zoo, 2016, also known as Fig 2.
- This could have the additional benefit of enabling designers to learn more about user preferences.
- Several ACI researchers are making progress in this direction.
Aims and activities
- ▪ Raise awareness of the value of auditory enrichment amongst the ACI community and beyond, also known as The workshop aims to.
- ▪ Provide opportunities for networking and creative teamwork.
- Structured workshop activities enabling people from different backgrounds to meet and discuss specific challenges in the field of auditory enrichment – starting with brainstorming sessions where participants work together to imagine concepts in response to the briefs.
- Opportunity to present final designs and answer questions ▪.
Biographies
- Fiona French is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing and Digital Media at London Metropolitan University.
- She is course leader for BSc Computer Games Programming and has organised several gamejams and other play related public events.
- Her research interests include Animal Computer Interaction, physical computing and toy and game design and development.
- Reinhard Gupfinger is a university assistant and PhD candidate researcher at the Tangible Music Lab at the University for Art and Design Linz, Austria.
- He has been researching how to use acoustic signals to better understand animals and the environment, focusing in particular on analysis of soundscapes to assess biodiversity.
Call for participation
- This workshop aims to bring together expertise from different disciplines, enabling participants to network and move towards designing and developing exciting new auditory enrichment experiences for a range of animals.
- The structure will follow the format of previous years’ ZooJam and FarmJam workshops [4] [3], which generated a broad range of innovative enrichment concepts in a relatively short time period.
- The gamejam format shapes the design process by offering both accelerated and constrained design [6] [8] with different rewards for different participants – some focused on outcomes, others on creativity, some on having learning opportunities, others on networking and finding potential research collaborators.
- To facilitate this, the workshop outputs will be shared publicly.
- This is an opportunity for those with an interest in animal welfare to share ideas and explore the potential of using acoustic technology to enhance enrichment.
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Citations
9 citations
Cites background from "SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for ..."
...In 2018, the SoundJam addressed opportunities for auditory enrichment for animals in a range of captive contexts [9] (chimpanzees, parrots, servals and elephants)....
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9 citations
References
531 citations
"SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for ..." refers background in this paper
...Current research in this area includes passive acoustic monitoring where soundscapes are captured and analysed to infer environmental parameters (Figs 3 & 4) [13], as well as animal behavioural studies [10]....
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61 citations
55 citations
"SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for ..." refers background in this paper
...On the other hand, Vivaldi (classical) had an observable calming effect on zebrafish [6], “classical music” seemed to reduce stereotypic behaviour in zoo-housed elephants [16], while soft rock and reggae has been documented as reducing stress in kennel-housed dogs [2]....
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47 citations
"SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for ..." refers background in this paper
...zebrafish [6], “classical music” seemed to reduce stereotypic behaviour in zoo-housed elephants [16], while soft rock and reggae has been documented as reducing stress in kennel-housed dogs [2]....
[...]
33 citations
"SoundJam 2018: acoustic design for ..." refers background in this paper
...Captive gorillas have shown preference for natural sounds over either silence or music (rock or classical) [12], while captive chimpanzees preferred silence to music [15], as did captive moloch gibbons [14]....
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