ICAD 2016 - 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display

ICAD is a highly interdisciplinary academic conference with relevance to researchers, practitioners, musicians, and students interested in the design of sounds to support tasks, improve performance, guide decisions, augment awareness, and enhance experiences. It is unique in its singular focus on auditory displays and the array of perception, technology, and application areas that this encompasses. Like its predecessors, ICAD 2016 will be a single-track conference, open to all, with no membership or affiliation requirements.
ICAD 2016-the 22nd International Conference on Auditory Display-will be held at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, from July 2 to 8, 2016. The conference venue is the ANU School of Music, in the downtown centre of Canberra. Workshops and the graduate student ThinkTank (doctoral consortium) will be on the weekend of July 2 and 3, before the main conference.
Note that ICAD is back-to-back with the conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) which will be held in Brisbane the following week, so international attendees can attend two international conferences for the one trip to Australia!
THEME: SONIC INFORMATION DESIGN
The designed world is rapidly replacing the natural world. Design has been called the "third culture" and has been distinguished from the Sciences and Arts by Nigel Cross in terms of
things to know: the natural world in science, human experience in art, and the artificial world in design.
ways of knowing: rationality and objectivity in science, reflection and subjectivity in art, and imagination and practicality in design.
ways of finding out: experiment and analysis in science, criticism and evaluation in art, and modelling and synthesis in design.
This year's theme - Sonic Information Design - has the aspiration that artificial sounds may be designed to make the world a better place. Like other design disciplines, Sonic Information Design takes a synergetic user-centred view of the relationship between artefacts, those that are affected by them, and the social contexts in which they occur. A Design orientation pays particular attention to the phenomenology of user experience - including physical, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic issues; the relationship between form, function, and content; and emerging concepts such as fun, playfulness and design futures. Practice-based research is considered as a generative process of exploration, speculation and discovery, with outcomes that can be provisional, contingent and aspirational, while aiming for richer, more situated understandings that lead to the advancement of knowledge and the proliferation of new realities.
Sonic Information Design draws on theoretical approaches from multiple disciplines to guide hypothesis testing at multiple points during an iterative process -what Bill Gaver calls "humble theory". Sonic Information Design recognises usefulness as critical for evaluating artefacts, and the perceptual alignment with data characteristics as critical for effective designs.
ICAD 2016 invites contributions that take a design approach, introduce design theory and apply design methods to Auditory Display and Data Sonification, with a view to building a conceptually robust foundation for Sonic Information Design.
TOPICS
Topics for ICAD2016 include new and emerging themes, as well as more traditional ICAD ones. Themes include but are not limited to:
Sonic Information Design
Stream-based Sonification and Auditory Scene Design
Acoustic Sonification - Small Data (personal, intimate) sonification and the quantised self.â?¨
Sonification, soundscape and screensound
Sonification in Health and Environmental Data (soniHED)
Musification - sonifications and music
Sonification, personal fabrication and maker culture
Sonification in the Internet of Things
Auditory Data Mining
Big Data sonification
3D and Spatial Audio
Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Culture of Auditory Displays
Accessibility
Applications
Design Theory and Methods
Evaluation and Usability
Human Factors and Interaction
Mappings from Data to Sound
Psychology, Cognition, Perception, and Psychoacoustics
Sonification and Exploration of Data through Sound
Sound as Art
Technologies and Tools
Presentations will be organised according to four major themes:
Auditory Data Mining
Interactive Sonication, including for sports and health.
Musification and Aesthetics
Auditory Perception, including spatialisation and inter/poly modality.