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The sound of touch: physical manipulation of digital sound

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The Sound of Touch is a new tool for real-time capture and sensitive physical stimulation of sound samples using digital convolution. Our hand-held wand can be used to (1) record sound, then (2) play back the recording by brushing, scraping, striking or otherwise physically manipulating the wand against physical objects. During playback, the recorded sound is continuously filtered by the acoustic interaction of the wand and the material being touched. The Sound of Touch enables a physical and continuous sculpting of sound that is typical of acoustic musical instruments and interactions with natural objects and materials, but not available in GUI-based tools or most electronic music instruments. This paper reports the design of the system and observations of thousands of users interacting with it in an exhibition format. Preliminary user feedback suggests future applications to foley, professional sound design, and musical performance.

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W. G. Gardner. Efficient convolution without input-output delay. Jour nal of the Audio Engineering Society, 43(3):127--136, 1995.
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A. Hunt, M. Wanderley, and M. Paradis. The importance of parameter ma pping in electronic instrument design. Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME'02), pages 1--6, 2002.
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D. Merrill and H. Raffle. The sound of touch. In the Extended Abstrac ts of Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI'07), 2007.
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S. O'Modhrain and G. Essl. Pebblebox and crumblebag: tactile interfac es for granular synthesis. Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME'04), pages 74--79, 2004.
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A. V. Oppenheim and R. W. Schafer. Discrete-Time Signal Processing. P rentice Hall, 1989.
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  • (2024)EchoTap: Non-Verbal Sound Interaction with Knock and Tap GesturesInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2348837(1-22)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Unvoiced Vowel Recognition Using Active Bio-Acoustic Sensing for Silent Speech InteractionArtificial Intelligence in HCI10.1007/978-3-031-35891-3_10(150-161)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2021)Playing by Ear: Designing for the Physical in a Sound-Based Virtual Reality NarrativeProceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3430524.3440635(1-9)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
1870 pages
ISBN:9781605580111
DOI:10.1145/1357054
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. digital convolution
  2. materials
  3. sensing
  4. sound design
  5. tangible user interface

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CHI '08
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CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 157 of 714 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)EchoTap: Non-Verbal Sound Interaction with Knock and Tap GesturesInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2348837(1-22)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Unvoiced Vowel Recognition Using Active Bio-Acoustic Sensing for Silent Speech InteractionArtificial Intelligence in HCI10.1007/978-3-031-35891-3_10(150-161)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2021)Playing by Ear: Designing for the Physical in a Sound-Based Virtual Reality NarrativeProceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3430524.3440635(1-9)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
  • (2018)SoundGloveExtended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3170427.3188554(1-6)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2018
  • (2017)Real-time timbre classification for tabletop hand drummingComputer Music Journal10.1162/COMJ_a_0041941:2(38-51)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2017
  • (2017)EchoSnap and PlayableAleProceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3024969.3025091(543-549)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2017
  • (2016)Multisensory texture exploration at the tip of the penInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.07.00585:C(47-56)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016
  • (2015)Sonification of Surface Tapping Changes Behavior, Surface Perception, and EmotionIEEE MultiMedia10.1109/MMUL.2015.1422:1(48-57)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2015
  • (2014)VuzikProceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design10.1145/2686612.2686649(240-249)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2014
  • (2010)Ubiquitous drumsCHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1753846.1754094(4009-4014)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2010
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