Fear Greed : Boom Crash – Emotion and Metaphor in Sonification Design
This weekend I was invited to speak by Prof. Holger Schulze for the Aural City Hearings that are part of his Sound Studies programme at the University of Art in Berlin. Last time I was here in Berlin a convoy of semi-trailers enveloped Berlin in doof doof for the Love Parade with levels of acoustic energy to sync your internal organs to the beat, so Aural City seemed a fitting theme.
My presentation links to the theme through a scenario that imagines a soundtrack of emotions generated from the financial markets at the big end of town mixed in with the trams, bawling crowds and backfiring of cars in the streetscape below. This idea, combined with the research on emotions in everyday sounds at IRCAM, has motivated the development of an emotional level in my design methodology …
This is an interactive mindmap of the presentation where you can click on the links to hear examples.
The following presentation by Prof. Thomas Dullo described research into Urban Sound Branding in which involved a study of residents living close to large scale sound producing events in order to learn how to manage and reduce perceptions of noise and annoyance.
Ernst-Reuter Platz
Prof. Alex Arteaga presented a 13 year project in which architectural elements will be designed to reduce the noise levels around the noisiest traffic roundabout in Berlin. This stimulated a lot of discussion which included fond memories, nostalgia and some resistance to the idea. Someone said it was the only place you could truly be alone in Berlin surounded by the blanket of noise.
The next day I went and lay on a park bench in the middle of the roundabout on a sunday afternoon in the beautiful spring weather. The all-encompassing ambience of fountains and traffic is open and spacious, an alternative aural reality that removes you from the everyday, a lot like the sound of waves at the beach.
During dinner Prof Schulze told me about a book series on Sound Studies that he has established, and his plans for an international Journal of Sound Design. Georg Spehr has just published a book on Functional Sound in this series that collects together the current research in this area from Germany. They also pointed me to the upcoming publication of Michael Bull’s Auditory Culture Reader and Jonathern Stern’s Sound Studies Reader as resources for teaching Sound Design. Max Schneider pointed me to Sound Cloud which is a site that allows you to annotate the timeline of online soundfiles.
In return I pointed them to some of the Australian activity in the area such as the online journal SCAN which is publishing an upcoming special issue on sound design, and Nigel Helyer’s Sound Culture site.
