Audio Mostly 2017 “Augmented and Participatory Sound/Music Experiences”
The Audio Mostly organising committee would like to welcome researchers, interaction designers, engineers, artists, practitioners, audio professionals, and anyone interested in sound as a medium of interaction, to Audio Mostly 2017. The conference will be held on 23-25 August 2017 at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK.
Audio Mostly is an interdisciplinary conference on design and experience of interaction with sound that prides itself on embracing applied theory and reflective practice. Its annual gatherings bring together thinkers and doers from academia and industry that share an interest in sonic interaction and the use of audio for interface design. This remit covers product design, auditory display, computer games and virtual environments, new musical instruments, and education and workplace tools. It further includes fields such as the psychology of sound and music, cultural studies, system engineering, and everything in between in which sonic interaction plays a role. The 2017 edition will be a lively and sociable mix of oral and poster paper presentations, demos, concerts, and workshops.
Audio Mostly 2017 is organised by the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London (UK), which is a world-leading multidisciplinary research group in the field of music/audio science and technology.
As in previous years, the Audio Mostly 2017 proceedings will be published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and made available through their digital library (TBC). Regular papers will be single-blind peer reviewed.
Conference Theme “Augmented and Participatory Sound/Music Experiences”
At the intersection between augmentation (“the action or process of making or becoming greater in size or amount”) and participation (“the action of taking part in something”) lies the idea of expanding how we interact with our environment and becoming actively involved in situations. Applied to science, the arts, health and the environment, these themes invite to push back the frontiers of design and interactions, to propose new artistic formats adapted to audience creative interventions, or to improve accessibility and empower people. Both augmentation and participation are linked to the sense of agency; augmentation generally implies increased degrees of freedom or access to new information, and participation in design or the arts involves a redistribution of the roles between designers/artists and users/audiences. The concept of augmentation can be applied to a wide range of objects (e.g. musical instruments, concert stage, garments, everyday objects), situations/actions (e.g. live performance, mixing, cooking), and reality itself with “augmented reality” systems and displays providing new sensory information. Participation can be applied at different stages of the production-consumption chain. For instance, participatory design gathers designers and users to conjunctly create artefacts, and participatory art leads to shared contributions from artists and audience participants.
What is the potential of sound/music in facilitating augmentation and/or participation?
Augmentation and participation both have the potential to transform our emotional or personal association with situations, people and objects.
How does augmentation and/or participation applied to sound/music affect our life and experiences? What are their advantages and what are their drawbacks?
Audio Mostly 2017 encourages the submission of regular papers, music, demos, and workshops addressing such questions and others related to the conference theme and topics. We welcome multidisciplinary approaches involving fields such as human computer interaction, music informatics, information and communication technologies, sound design, visualisation, composition, perception/cognition and aesthetics. Please visit our calls for papers, music, demos, and workshops for more detailed information.
Colocation with 3rd Web Audio Conference (WAC)
The conference will be collocated with the 3rd Web Audio Conference (WAC) “Collaborative Audio” (21-23 August 2017), with one day, Wednesday the 23rd, a common day between the two events. Participants will have the opportunity to attend both events at a discounted rate.
