Emerging practices in sonic interaction are a fertile field of investigation on the ways sound can mediate everyday embodied, technological and social actions. Augmenting everyday objects with digital sound and sensor technologies allows us to create scenarios of expressive sonic processes. From sonic knives to musical basketballs, sonic augmentation affords creativity, functional design and exploration of new possibilities of actions in the technologically augmented everyday. This talk will present the phenomenological basis of embodiment, the psychological basis of affordance, to interrogate the potential of musical and sonic affordance, arriving at the notion of embodied sonic cognition and a series of user centered design workshops to develop this idea.
Atau Tanaka, studied Physical Sciences at Harvard and has a doctorate in Computer Music Composition from Stanford University’s CCRMA. His first inspirations came upon meeting John Cage during his Norton Lectures and would go to on re-create Cage’s Variations VII. He has played in the Tokyo noise underground with artists like Merzbow and Otomo and his work presented at NTT/ICC Tokyo, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Eyebeam, Wood Street Gallery, and SFMOMA. He has been artistic ambassador for Apple, worked in the pedagogy department at IRCAM, and as researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). He has been mentor at NESTA, Artistic Co-Director of STEIM in Amsterdam, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle and oversees technology strategy for the Parisian mobile startup, Clicmobile.

Journée du 18 juillet 2013

Overview of current research at IRCAM Hugues Vinet (Ircam, France) Human-computer confluence in search of an identity Walter Van de Velde (EU Commission, Belgium) Embodied Sonic Interaction: Gesture, sound, and the everyday Atau Tanaka (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) Round Table session animated by Walter Van de Velde