[ISEA2019] Paper: Steven Devleminck, Boris Debackere & Toon Van Waterschoot — Multi-viewpoint Strategies: Ambisonic Auralization and Localization through Walking and Listening as Places of Negotiation in Conditions of Hybridity and Change

Abstract

Keywords: liquid, cartography, multi-viewpoint, sound, localization and auralization, technology, multi-sensory integration

This research introduces the concept of ‘liquidity’ as a framework through which to observe the ways that the lived-in world and particularly society and culture are experienced and discussed as social subjects. It has become apparent that this notion of ‘liquidity’ plays an important role in the generation of novelty, that is, to generate new insights and meanings. Recent studies by Bhabha (1994) or Bauman (2007) identify an apparent shift in the way we experience and deal with modern society replacing the rigid cognitive frameworks by more ‘fluid’ interactions. To understand and to deal with this new concept, a cartography of these liquid times is installed through the design of an artistic Ambisonic sound localization and auralization project. The car- tography follows in depth two specific trajectories. What are the merits of a ‘point of view’ within a liquid society? What type of auralized experiments can be introduced? The scientific and artistic aim is to establish a multi-viewpoint approach (walking, listening and seeing through a state of the art technology) replacing single viewpoint categorization, a concept also to be applied  to the reading of the artworks itself.

  • Steven Devleminck holds a Master degree in Engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium, and a PhD in Art and Philosophy from the University of the Arts, London, UK. Previously, he was the Director of the Transmedia Research Programme in Arts, Media and Design of the Leuven University College of the Arts (LUCA), Belgium, and visiting Professor at ma HKU, Utrecht, Netherlands. Currently he is the Head of the Mediated Environments Research Group at LUCA School of Arts and Professor at the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven. His publications include books and a series of internationally published articles and conference papers. His practice based work has been shown internationally. Research interests are mediated environments, interactive technology, cartography and mapping. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the Innoviris Anticipate ‘Smart Urban Community Interface Blocks’ research project investigating the design of IoT toolkits for creating interactive urban interventions for both placemaking and civic purposes.
  • Boris Debackere is an artist and researcher lecturing at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium. Debackere is currently serving as the head of V2_Lab in Rotterdam, Netherlands, an instigator of artistic projects that interrogate and illuminate contemporary issues in art, science, technology, and society. As a media artist, his primary interest lies in the interplay of art with the social and technological space. In the field of digital art, his practice has a multimedial character with a recurring key concept: to experience the materiality and performativity of a medium that might appear to be a virtual environment. Debackere received the Liedts-Meesen new media nomination 2010, won the Georges Delete 2014 Prize for Best Original Music and Sound Design and received the 2015 Ensor Sound Design Award.
  • Toon van Waterschoot received MSc (2001) and PhD (2009) degrees in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven, Belgium, where he is currently Associate Professor. He has previously held teaching and research positions at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and the University of Lugano in Switzerland. His research interests are in signal processing, machine learning, and numerical optimization, applied to acoustic signal enhancement, acoustic modeling, audio analysis, and audio reproduction. He has been the Scientific Coordinator of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Dereverberation and Reverberation of Audio, Music, and Speech (DREAMS)” and currently holds a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council on “The Spatial Dynamics of Room Acoustics (SONORA)”. He is a Director of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), a Member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee, and a Founding Member of the European Acoustics Association’s Technical Committee in Audio Signal Processing.

Full text (PDF) p. 99-105