ICAD 2007, Day 2
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Some more juicy sonic cherries picked from ICAD Day 2 …
Scott Brewer from the SIAL Sound Studio, RMIT, Melbourne, presented a poster, “CREATING A VIRTUAL SUIKINKUTSU”, describing the SuperCollider physically modeled synthesis of the Suikinkutsu - a Japanese garden feature that implements a below-ground chamber that resonates the sounds of water drips running off from a hand-wash bowl - kind of like a miniature of Jem Finer’s Score for a Hole in the Ground. Here’s a diagram (taken from a book by Morozumi) in Brewer’s paper:

K. Vogt presented a poster “SONIFICATION OF SPIN MODELS. LISTENING TO PHASE TRANSITIONS IN THE ISING AND POTTS MODEL.” which utilized two personal audio processing favourites of mine - spatialization and granulation to model particle spin theory. The result was burbley sound textures that morphed out of strongly pitched textures.
Peter Lennox (of University of Derby’s SPARG), in his paper with Tony Myatt, titled “CONCEPTS OF PERCEPTUAL SIGNIFICANCE FOR COMPOSITION AND REPRODUCTION OF EXPLORABLE SURROUND SOUND FIELDS”, mentioned the idea of cartoonification of spatial sound mixes - as a concept to economically increase the realism of virtual audio environments by focusing on creating the right *impression*, rather than painstakingly recreating exact features that may not be perceived for some reason, or that distract or diminish the desired impression. Of course, this cartoonification is exactly what film sound designers already do, though Lennox talks of taking this concept into the world of spatial sound rendering. He also made a strong argument for returning space to music, through applications such as spatial DJing - as a more sophisticated version of sound diffusion performance capability.




