Autumn is here, and AudioMostly is again getting near. This year, AM goes Scotland, and the event will be hosted by the Glasgow Caledonian University. I really look forward to the event, not least because of the conference theme this year: "Sound and Emotion". The program can be found here.

Looks like a nice selection of presentations, but also intimate enough to foster great conversations. And I’m really looking forward to hear Patrik Juslin’s keynote… I will also give a presentation of my own, entitled "Modelling the emotional listener: making psychological processes audible". I’ll put it up online after the event, so stay tuned!

Sonic Interaction Design, or SID for short, is a COST-ICT Action aimed at strengthening the research, and technology development networks involved with sonic interaction. The action encompasses a number of strategic European concerted research actions concerning future technologies and services

This autumn, the SID network is hosting a workshop on Sonic Sketching. The workshop will deal with design, sketching in general and particularly in ways in which sound can be prototyped. There will also be a poster and demo session for people to present their work relating to the workshop topic. The deadline for poster and demo submissions is September 7th and authors will be notified of acceptance by September 15th.

You will find more details about the workshop, such as dates, topics and submission guidelines, on this page.

What does sonic sketching mean, then? Well, I suspect a part of this workshop will be precisely finding out that. As of now, there really is no established design methodology for working with sound, especially in the prototyping stage. Sound doesn’t have its storyboards, or paper prototypes.

What I use a lot, however, is the voice. There are really so many awesome things you can do with your voice, even without that much training. But with a little training, and a huge amount of self-confidence, the voice can become a very useful prototyping tool. Foreign languages, for example, are a great way to learn to make new sounds. How about these Xhosa sounds for a starter? And if you train a little (or a lot) more, you can do quite a lot just with your voice. Just listen to this lovely Pink Panther theme by Bobby McFerrin. Or how about a little polyharmonic singing - yeah, thats when you sing two tones at the same time. So how about using this cool device of ours for vocal prototyping?

Having worked with different experience prototyping methods in the past, I’ve always felt there is a special tug in people’s stomachs whenever they start prototyping something that sounds. The voice is just so personal! Working to overcome these comfort barriers, both by myself personally and together with other designers, research colleagues, and students, has been quite interesting! I guess being an extrovert really helps in a field like this.