Digital arts and technology studies
Andrea Giomi, Temporary Lecturer, Digital Arts and technologies, Univ. Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France
As an artist-researcher in the arts and technologies, and a specialist in systems of gesture-sound interaction, I first encountered the term “sonification” in my postdoctoral work at the Université Grenoble Alpes, during which I became interested in how contemporary gestural repertoires can be measured, analyzed, and represented by ways of sound media. The term was formally introduced in the first half of the 1990s, referring to a set of technical processes used to transform data relations, whatever the nature of the data, into audibly perceptible relations meant to facilitate communication, analysis or interpretation. As a part of my research, I have confronted the theory and the practice of sonification from two different perspectives: the sonification of movement and the art of sonification.
The sonification of movement is emerging as an autonomous domain that integrates a wide array of disciplines such as the neurosciences, reeducation, athletic training, and human machine-interaction. In this context, motion capture tools are used to generate sound feedback in response to a gesture. Recently, this practice has been the object of increasing interest in the choreographic field. In the context of my practice, sonification serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it provides the dancer with an exteroceptive and multimodal stimulus, permitting them to interrogate the conditions of sensorimotor possibility at the root of the creation of their gesture; on the other hand, it constitutes a sensorial trace complementary to the gaze, which, in amplifying the dynamic nuances and tonalities of the gesture, anchors the analysis in sound perception, and not in visual observation alone.
The art of sonification is a new artistic practice at the crossroads of sound arts and digital arts, but which occasionally calls back to diverse disciplines such as field investigation, sculpture, and architecture. The main goal of this artistic practice is that of inducing awareness of a phenomenon or process issuing from the real world (urban, societal, economic, natural, scientific, etc.) via audition. In this sense, numerous artists have recently become interested in techniques of sonification in order to consider, through listening, a new ethical-aesthetic rapport with the environment. Within the scope of my artistic practice, I recently participated in the creation of an installation We Have Never Been Human (MK&G, Hambourg) in which we carried out a sonification of the growth processes of “chemical gardens,” namely, structures that form by precipitation when a grain of metal salt is poured into an aqueous solution containing silicates.
In conclusion, the term, virtually absent in French publications, appealed to me because it suggests an epistemological paradigm that is complementary to visualization. It emphasizes the way sound material makes perceptible a set of data, along with the relationship between the data, thus making it easier to understand a certain phenomenon through our sensations.
More from this author:
Andrea Giomi, « Du field recording à l’art de la sonification. Nouveaux enjeux éthico-esthétiques entre conscience environnementale, activisme et écologie sonore », Revue Filigrane - Musique, esthétique, sciences, société, 26 : « À l’écoute des lieux : le field recording comme pratique artistique et activisme écologique », 2022
Andrea Giomi, « Somatic Sonification in Dance Performances. From the Artistic to the Perceptual and Back », Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO '20), New Jersey, NJ, ACM, 2020.
Cite this item: Andrea Giomi, “Sonification”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177899
