miMic
miMic, a sonic analogue of paper and pencil is proposed: An augmented microphone for vocal and gestural sonic sketching. Vocalizations are classified and interpreted as instances of sound models, which the user can play with by vocal and gestural control. The physical device is based on a modified microphone, with embedded inertial sensors and buttons. Sound models can be selected by vocal imitations that are automatically classified, and each model is mapped to vocal and gestural features for real-time control. With miMic, the sound designer can explore a vast sonic space and quickly produce expressive sonic sketches, which may be turned into sound prototypes by further adjustment of model…
To “Sketch-a-Scratch”
A surface can be harsh and raspy, or smooth and silky, and everything in between. We are used to sense these features with our fingertips as well as with our eyes and ears: the exploration of a surface is a multisensory experience. Tools, too, are often employed in the interaction with surfaces, since they augment our manipulation capabilities. “Sketch-a-Scratch” is a tool for the multisensory exploration and sketching of surface textures. The user’s actions drive a physical sound model of real materials’ response to interactions such as scraping, rubbing or rolling. Moreover, different input signals can be converted into 2D visual surface profiles, thus enabling to experience them visually…
Growing the practice of vocal sketching
Sketch-thinking in the design domain is a complex representational activity, emerging from the reflective conversation with the sketch. A recent line of research on computational support for sound design has been focusing on the exploitation of voice, and especially vocal imitations, as effective representation strategy for the early stage of the design process. A set of introductory exercises on vocal sketching, to probe the communication effectiveness of vocal imitations for design purposes, are presented and discussed, in the scope of the research-through-design workshop activities of the EU project SkAT-VG
Analyzing and organizing the sonic space of vocal imitations
The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In order to devise tools that facilitate sound design by vocal sketching we attempt at organizing a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the two principal components, it is experimentally checked how meaningful the resulting clusters are for humans. Eventually, a representative of each cluster, chosen to be close to its centroid, may serve as a landmark in the exploration of the sound space, and vocal imitations may serve as proxies for synthetic sounds.
Sonic in(tro)spection by vocal sketching
How can the art practice of self-representation be ported to sonic arts? In S’i’ fosse suono, brief sonic self-portraits are arranged in the form of an audiovisual checkerboard. The recorded non-verbal vocal sounds were used as sketches for synthetic renderings, using two seemingly distant sound modeling techniques. Through this piece, the authors elaborate on the ideas of self-portrait, vocal sketching, and sketching in sound design. The artistic exploration gives insights on how vocal utterances may be automatically converted to synthetic sounds, and ultimately how designers may effectively sketch in the domain of sound.
Organizing a sonic space through vocal imitations
A two-dimensional space is proposed for exploration and interactive design in the sonic space of a sound model. A number of reference items, positioned as landmarks in the space, contain both a synthetic sound and its vocal imitation, and the space is geometrically arranged based on the acoustic features of these imitations. The designer may specify new points in the space either by geometric interpolation or by direct vocalization. In order to understand how the vast and complex space of the human voice could be organized in two dimensions, we collected a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the …