Sound prevails in most aspects of contemporary human communication, interaction, experience and expressiveness. Nowadays, audio is a basic ingredient of multimodal content that is massively interchanged through interacting producers and users within the Web2.0 environment and beyond.
This explosion in the use of audio has been mainly motivated and fueled by the exponential growth of the social media, the vast expansion of user-generated content, and the domination of smartphones, tablets and other mobile and wearable technologies. Sound can engage, inform, narrate, dramatize, shape the atmosphere, stimulate emotions, attract attention and create adventure. Audio modalities are part of infotainment services, interactive documentaries and non-linear stories, e-learning environments, TV-series, movies, games and all kinds of multimedia projects and installations. They are also encountered in more demanding pervasive and semantically enhanced computing services engaging context and location awareness, as well as in virtual and augmented reality human-machine interaction. While sound in all of its forms holds tremendous potential for interaction design and associated implementations, still, the interfacing abilities of contemporary audio have not been fully explored and deployed. Undoubtedly, audio holds a key role in the upcoming trends and services towards the transition to the semantic web i.e. Web3.0, validating once again an old saying deriving from the sound design and film industry: ‘sound is more than half of the picture’.
Nonetheless, interdisciplinary studies of auditory experience open up new areas for scientific and artistic fields, crucial to our understanding of the world, ourselves and everyday life. The hegemony of vision has come to an end and our contemporary noisy life has changed irrevocably current auditory cultures. The development of sound, as an artistic medium beyond the traditional music frameworks, also illustrates new approaches to art, architecture and contemporary culture engaged with a plethora of new methodologies and practices.
During the last decade, the Audio Mostly Conference has annually brought together audio professionals, scientists and researchers, artists, theorists, content creators, interaction designers, web and social media experts, gaming and mobile application developers, behavioral researchers and others. The conference constitutes an important event for sharing, promoting and disseminating knowledge associated with the untapped potential of audio interaction.
The area of interests covers a variety of novel audio designs; interactive processing and interfacing applications in various environments and computing terminals, ranging from screens and keyboards, audio and general multimedia peripherals to smart phone and sensory and other mobile devices; essays on interactive sound, listening experience, auditory culture and sound art installations.
These innovative Human Machine Interaction (HMI) interfaces can be engaged either solely in pure audio applications or in combination with other modalities, thus promoting multimodal mediated communication and interaction. This technological and scientific area implies cognitive research and applied psychology, social media engagement and semantic interaction issues, design methodology and practice, as well as technological innovations in audio analysis, processing and rendering. The aim is to both describe and push the boundaries of sound-based interaction in various domains, such as industry, mobile applications, computer games, education, entertainment, virtual reality, content semantic analysis and conceptualization, auditory cultures, auditory experience, sound and digital art.
The theme of this year is “Sound, Semantics and Social Interaction”
This theme aims at confronting issues related to audio design, semantic processing and interaction that can be part of enhanced multimodal HMI in the social media landscape. It also attempts to investigate their role and involvement in the deployment of innovative web and multimedia semantic services as part of the transition to the Web3.0 era. A representative theme example that can be drawn here is that audio content production, music clips recording, editing, and sound design processes can be collaboratively applied within the social media networking context, while registering content shares and tagging with user feedback for semantically enhanced interaction. Moreover, besides technology-oriented approaches to the conference theme, submissions that refer to interdisciplinary work in this domain are strongly encouraged, including i) psychological research on the influence of auditory cues in shaping human multimodal perception, semantic processing, emotional affect, and social interaction within rich context environments, and ii) presentation of new practices of using sound as a medium for enhancing social interaction in new media artworks, and soundscapes.
Topics of Interest:
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Sound design
- Music design and interaction
- Semantic audio and conceptualization
- Multimodal interactive applications
- Mobile audio systems
- Non-linear storytelling
- Audio in video and interactive video performances
- Audio in gaming interaction
- Social sharing of audio and music
- Collaborative audio processing
- Intelligent audio processing
- Spatial audio and multi-sensor systems
- 3D audio in films and games
- Audio behavioral and sentiment analysis
- Context-aware and emotional audio
- Sonic environment, Soundscapes and social interaction
- Auditory culture, listening and experience
- Sound art installations
- Virtual and augmented reality acoustics
- Sound recognition and cognitive systems
