Overview

This project compiles a database of various interactive sound installations described in the academic literature in the past 50 years. It's intended for sound and multimedia artists, designers, and researchers looking for design precedent, inspiration, or an overview of trends in the field. A corpus of several hundreds interactive sound installations was reviewed to derive a taxonomy describing them across three perspectives, subdivided across more than a hundred categories: Artistic Intention, Interaction, and System Design (see the Glossary for definitions). The proposed framework might help to identify similarities and differences in design and implementation of interactive sound installations, along with design trends.

We propose two visualization tools to navigate the database: 1) a dynamic sunburst chart to navigate across categories and subcategories of the proposed framework, and generate lists of installations that share similar characteristics; and 2) a network graph to visualize the relationships between installations, and to identify clusters of installations that share similar characteristics.

Context

This research was initiated in 2020, as part of a doctoral research project conducted by Valérian Fraisse, at McGill University's IDMIL Lab, under the supervision of Catherine Guastavino and Marcelo Wanderley. It also includes more recent contributions from Clémentine Berger. The website was designed with the help of Camille Magnan. For more information on the research project, please refer to the following publications:

Contributing

There are plenty of avenues to contribute to this project, especially to expand the database and include more recent installations as well as artworks reported outside of the academic literature (such as artist statements, museum archives, press, etc.). Other direections for improvement include adding a geographic visualization, and audio/video excerpts when available. If you would like to contribute, feel free to reach out!