Mads Walther-Hansen

The Sound of the Smell of my Shoes

Given the sensory poverty of virtual environments, such as those found in computer games that rely, in the main, solely on audio-visual interfaces, how best do we attain the experience of presence in those environments when presence requires the construction of a coherent (in the sense of realism) place in which to be and in which to act? The paper explores this question through an investigation of the senses of hearing and smell and suggests the possibility of introducing the experience of odours into such environments through the use of sound.

Being in a Virtual World: Presence, Environment, Salience, Sound

We present a theoretical model of how presence is achieved in virtual worlds, from which future frameworks prescribing the sensory design of such worlds can be constructed. Drawing on the study of cognitive metaphors and the concept that sound is an emergent perception we offer an account of the environment as a salient and dynamic construct that functions as a metonym for the nonself. Separating environment from world, we discuss the role of sound in the forming of the environment and argue that it is this environment that establishes the means for presence because it is the process behind the construction of the environment that individuates self from nonself and such differentiation is a defining feature of the concept of presence.

Balancing Audio: Towards a Cognitive Structure of Sound Interaction in Music Production

This paper explores the concept of balance in music production and examines the role of conceptual metaphors in reasoning about audio editing. Balance may be the most central concept in record production, however, the way we cognitively understand and respond meaningfully to a mix requiring balance is not thoroughly understood. In this paper I treat balance as a metaphor that we use to reason about several different actions in music production, such as adjusting levels, editing the frequency spectrum or the spatiality of the recording. This study is based on an exploration of a linguistic corpus of sound engineering literature. Using this corpus, I show how corpus data may contribute to better understand the relation between embodied patterns of experience and hands-on interaction with sound.

AM'15 Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2015 on Interaction With Sound

Given the sensory poverty of virtual environments, such as those found in computer games that rely, in the main, solely on audio-visual interfaces, how best do we attain the experience of presence in those environments when presence requires the construction of a coherent (in the sense of realism) place in which to be and in which to act? The paper explores this question through an investigation of the senses of hearing and smell and suggests the possibility of introducing the experience of odours into such environments through the use of sound.