ICAD 09 Sonification Contest

14 people contributed 21 entries to the Sonification contest at ICAD 09 in Copenhagen. There were 18 entries in the artistic category and 3 in the scientific category. In the final judgement only the scientific entries were considered. The judges were divided so the pieces were played to the conferees and the decision was made by show of hands.

Congratulations to Sam Ferguson who took the prize of a MAX/MSP license for his piece HarmonicExons.

My piece YeastLur was modelled on the music of the Viking horn called a Lur. Nice try but no MAX license …

I actually meant to enter it into the artistic category, given the lack of any objective evaluation, but missed ticking the box. I suppose it was somewhat scientific in that there was an explicit rationale for the decision to organise the pitches so that the start codon produces a distinctive downward fanfare. The testable hypothesis would be that subjects can recongise boundaries between introns and extrons from this fanfare. But if you look at the data more closely you realise that this is a gross simplification. There was also an artistic rationale for the choice of the Lur music in the context of a concert in Denmark. But many of the other sonifications also had explicit rationales.

The concert raised the question of the distinction between scientific and artistic sonification. And what does judgement by popular appeal  have to do with either? Perhaps DESIGN provides a more suitable framework for understanding the multifaceted issues of form, function and popular communication through sound in sonifications. Design provides a framework for evaluating the usefulness of the sonification for a specific purpose. It also provides an openess to aesthetic aspects. As the foreword to the Brit Design Awards 2009 says, although satisfying the brief is paramount the cultural and social meaning of a design can also be critically important.

In an analysis of the 30 sonifications submitted to the Listening to the Mind Listening concert of sonifications at ICAD in Sydney 2004 we found  four major stages in the design process, and significant differences in the perception of functionality and aesthetics depending on whether the reviewer of the sonification was a sonification researcher, computer music composer, or a general listener.