This paper presents a set of three interactive sound objects, collectively titled the Book of Knowledge of Impractical Musical Devices. Loosely based on an early 13th century Islamic engineering handbook, the instruments were designed to adhere strictly to a set of design constraints. In doing so, the resulting designs raise questions about the role digital musical interfaces can play in interrogating our relationship to media. I will describe the design and development of the instruments, including technical details and conceptual background, particularly focusing on how the project designed for and with the selected constraints.

The Memory Cloud is a musical instrument that uses a player's own library of personal recordings as sonic material. This paper presents the design of the instrument, situating it within sustainability HCI studies and constraints-based design, before describing the instrument being used by two musicians in a professional context. Over 2000 sounds from the musician's personal cloud library, dating back over 10 years, were placed in the instrument as the only sonic material available for exploring. I argue that a radically small scale and personal approach could be one strategy for addressing the issues of longevity in NIME, and I suggest that using personal media libraries presents a potential affordance and constraint for musical instrument design.

Sonification and sonic interaction design aim to create meaningful displays and digital interactions using data and information from the most disparate fields (astronomy, finance, health, security, for example) as the basis of the design. To date there are no standards and conventions on how to meaningfully link data to sound, therefore designers develop these connections on a case-by-case basis. Participatory workshops which target end-users and domain experts are a way for sound designers to find meaningful connections between data and sounds at the start of the design process so that final outcomes are more likely to be effective and accepted by users.In this paper, we present and discuss the participatory workshop methods we have developed within the \textit{Sound for Energy} project. In particular, we will highlight the aspects that can be easily transferable to other target domains. With this, we contribute to the effort of making sonification and sonic interaction design a more viable and accepted alternative to traditional, usually visual, displays.

This paper presents Robots for Distant Musicians (RFDM), a project developed as part of a residency at the MICA Game Lab in Baltimore, Maryland in 2020-21. A set of musically responsive robots were built that could be accessed through existing online communication platforms, enabling their control from anywhere in the world. This resulted in a series of playful interactions which revealed underlying tensions in the systems that the world came to depend upon during the pandemic. I propose to bring several of the robots from this project to the DIS Playful Experiences Demotrack, allowing users both locally and from around the world to control them through musical sound.

This paper presents the Period Instrument, an interface for musical expression that requires the input of menstrual blood in order to be played. Drawing from both experimental musical instrument design and feminist design, the resulting object exists both as a sound-making device as well as a vector for challenging normative principles of musical instrument design. Moreover, the Period Instrument represents a particular representation and physical embodiment of time. We will discuss the design and technological development of the instrument, focusing primarily on how designing with and for time constraints can result in new interfaces for musical expression.

This paper presents a set of three different designed objects which each take a different approach to the same concept - the active destruction of sound recordings. I situate this work within sustainability studies, political ecologies of technology, and constraints-based design. Following this I describe the design and development of the devices themselves, introduce the final built objects, and attempt to analyze what they might represent. The paper takes the form of an annotated portfolio, in which the objects are shown, analyzed, and critically evaluated.

In this paper we present a system for the sonification of the electricity drawn by different household appliances. The system uses SpecSinGAN as the basis for the sound design, which is an unconditional generative architecture that takes a single one-shot sound effect (e.g., a fire crackle) and produces novel variations of it. SpecSinGAN is based on single-image generative adversarial networks that learn from the internal distribution of a single training example (in this case the spectrogram of the sound file) to generate novel variations of it, removing the need of a large dataset. In our system, we use a python script in a Raspberry PI to receive the data of the electricity drawn by an appliance via a Smart Plug. The data is then sent to a Pure Data patch via Open Sound Control. The electricity drawn is mapped to the sound of fire, which is generated in real-time using Pure Data by mixing different variations of four fire sounds - a fire crackle, a low end fire rumble, a mid level rumble, and hiss - which were synthesised offline by SpecSinGAN. The result is a dynamic fire sound that is never the same, and that grows in intensity depending on the electricity consumption. The density of the crackles and the level of the rumbles increase with the electricity consumption. We pilot tested the system in two households, and with different appliances. Results confirm that, from a technical standpoint, the sonification system responds as intended, and that it provides an intuitive auditory display of the energy consumed by different appliances. In particular, this sonification is useful in drawing attention to “invisible” energy consumption. Finally, we discuss these results and future work.

This paper describes an ideation workshop aiming to explore the intersection of sonic interactions and energy use. As part of a larger research project exploring the role that sound can play in efficient energy behaviours, the workshop encouraged users to look for overlaps between their home resource use, potential sonic feedback and the feelings and emotions elicited by both. The workshop design was successful in providing non-experts with space and tools to reflect on the complex relationship between household, sound, energy and our feelings towards them. On a more practical level, 15 “hotspots” were identified where sound and energy concerns could be potentially addressed with sonic interventions, and four speculative prototypes were developed during the workshop each one revealing original considerations and relationships between sound and energy to be developed further in future work.

The creation of music relies heavily on, and is tightly intertwined with, mass production and industrialisation, making it virtually inseparable from many of the fundamental issues that make up the climate crisis today. Music (and the arts more generally) has the potential to play a role in influencing behaviour and effecting structural change by showcasing the issues at play and raising awareness around the magnitude of the crisis. However, digital music making contains an embedded political ecology and problematic history which must be assessed and acknowledged in order to effectively leverage this power. Therefore this paper will situate digital music within a cultural history of industrialisation, with all of the ecology contained therein. Building upon this, a set of approaches will be laid out that draw from established ICT4S concepts of limits theory and heuristic design, combined with artistic practice, proposing potential ways forward that will encourage digital music making to move towards a sustainable future and position musical tools to challenge societal norms.

This paper proposes an interface based on melodic input, encouraging a user to sing in order to interact with a device. We describe the early stages of designing and prototyping a sound-reactive shower, which is controlled by a user singing to control the flow of water. We then discuss the implications of this design with regards to energy and resource efficiency, as well as being a form of provocation and experimental interface design. Interaction design has an important role to play in facilitating sustainable behaviour in the household. We propose that sonic interfaces such as this can contribute to this area of work, and that an interface based on melodic input can be used to seamlessly activate and deactivate a system while using hands and vision to accomplish other actions and reducing energy consumption. In this paper, the prototype is described, evaluated and results are discussed. Finally, directions for future work and extensions of this system are proposed.