Array, the journal of the International Computer Music Association
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Sound, Media Art, and the Metaverse
Get PDFThe author discusses the fundamental role of sound in global cultures, introduces related perceptual and scientific phenomena such as synesthesia, and provides an overview of their relationship to the development of transmodal multimedia art and design forms emerging at the intersection of physical and digital media, including wireless technologies, social networks, and ubiquitous computing. The article is an edited version of the introductory address given at the opening event of Si15 Soundislands Festival, on Wednesday 19 August 2015, at the Arts House, Singapore
Super‐Normal Integration of Sound and Vision in Performance
Get PDFIn the world of rock, blues, and popular music, guitarists who pull faces when they play are somehow more entertaining to watch – as if there is an agreement between the performer and the audience that certain facial gestures enhance the expression of the music at key moments. How does this agreement come about? What is it that viewers and performers share? Research in the field of cross-modal perception has demonstrated that humans share systematic linkages between the senses, including vision and audition. For example, people link higher pitched sounds with smaller, paler, and higher-up objects than lower sounds (e.g., Mondloch & Maurer, 2004). Yet few investigations have explored how these linkages relate to performance in the creative arts. One theory suggests that artists have stronger functional connectivity between sensory areas, and are therefore able to invoke or translate sensory experiences across modalities, using sensory metaphors, and strategic sensory exaggeration (Ramachandran, 2003). To test if viewers share a sensory experience with performers, we asked participants in an online quiz to guess which of two guitar faces ‘went with’ particular moments in guitar solos. One-hundred and seventeen volunteers guessed guitar faces at rates higher than would be predicted by chance, indicating that people were able to draw meaningful information about music from still images of the guitarist’s face. In addition to presenting the results of the study in a poster format, this demonstration will give visitors a chance to engage with the interaction between musical performance and performative gesture, in two activities. 
Pre-Conscious Automaticity of Sound-‐Shape Mapping
Get PDFThe bouba–kiki effect depicts a non-arbitrary mapping between specific shapes and non-words: an angular shape is more often named with a sharp sound like ‘kiki’, while a curved shape is more often matched to a blunter sound like ‘bouba’. This effect shows a natural tendency of sound-shape pairing and has been shown to take place among adults who have different mother tongues (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001), pre-schoolers (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006), and even four-month-olds (Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013). These studies therefore establish that similar sound-to-shape mappings could happen among different cultures and early in development, suggesting the mappings may be innate and possibly universal. However, it remains unclear what level of mental processing gives rise to these perceptions: the mappings could rely on introspective processes about ‘goodness-of-fit,’ or they could rely on automatic sensory processes which are active prior to conscious awareness. Here we designed several experiments to directly examine the automaticity of the bouba-kiki effect. Specifically, we examined whether the congruency of a sound-shape pair can be processed before access to awareness? 
