Interactive Sonification Workshop
(ISon 2016)

 

December 16th 2016
(with satellite event on 15th)
CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
www.interactive-sonification.org

 

Latest News

• 2016-11-10: Information for the mini workshops on the 15th December has been updated
• 2016-11-10: Workshop schedule is available. Detail schedule of the poster sessions will be updated after receiving the camera-ready submissions
• 2016-11-07: Registration information and hotel recommendations are available
• 2016-11-05: Review results have been announced

Welcome

The ISon 2016 will take place in Bielefeld, Germany, on December 16th 2016, with a satellite event on the 15th of December 2016. It is organized by the Cognitive Interaction Technology Cluster of Excellence (CITEC).

The ISon 2016 meeting is the 5th International workshop on Interactive Sonification, following the initial ISon 2004 in Bielefeld and the previous ISon 2007 in York, ISon 2010 in Stockholm and ISon 2013 in Erlangen. The meeting offers the chance to:

• meet experts in sonification,
• present and demonstrate your own research,
• strengthen your International / European networking in sonification research,
• learn about new exciting trends.

 

In this workshop we will pay special attention to Adaptivity and Scaffolding in Interactive sonification, i.e. how auditory feedback and interactive sonification provide a scaffolding for familiarizing with interaction and learning to interact, and how users adapt their activity patterns according to the feedback and their level of experience. For example, a sports movement sonification could initially focus the displayed information on the most basic pattern (e.g. active arm) and once the user progresses (i.e. feedback indicates that they understand and utilize this information), increasingly subtle further cues (e.g. knees) would be made more salient. This feeds into the important question, how we can evaluate the complex and temporally developing interrelationship between the human user and an interactive system that is coupled to the user by means of interactive sonification. To make a sustainable contribution, we strongly encourage a reproducible research approach in Interactive Sonification to:

• allow for the formal evaluation and comparison of Interactive Sonification systems,
• establish standards in Interactive Sonification.

High quality will be assured by a peer-reviewing process, and besides an online publication in the Bielefeld University PUB data base we plan to also publish a special journal issue, as following the past ISon workshops (see IEEE Multimedia Special Issue on Interactive Sonification 2005, Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 2012 and IEEE Multimedia 2015).

About ISon

Sonification and Auditory Displays are increasingly becoming an established technology for exploring data, monitoring complex processes, or assisting exploration and navigation of data spaces. Sonification addresses the auditory sense by transforming data into sound, allowing the human user to get valuable information from data by using their natural listening skills. The main differences of sound displays over visual displays are that sound can:

• Represent frequency responses in an instant (as timbral characteristics)
• Represent changes over time, naturally
• Allow microstructure to be perceived
• Rapidly portray large amounts of data
• Alert listener to events outside the current visual focus
• Holistically bring together many channels of information

Auditory displays typically evolve over time since sound is inherently a temporal phenomenon. Interaction thus becomes an integral part of the process in order to select, manipulate, excite or control the display, and this has implications for the interface between humans and computers. In recent years it has become clear that there is an important need for research to address the interaction with auditory displays more explicitly.

Organising Committee (ISon 2016)

Conference Chairs::

• Thomas Hermann, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
• Roberto Bresin, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

Paper Chair:

• Jiajun Yang, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Advisory Board:

• Andy Hunt, University of York, York, U.K.

Satellite Events

There are several satellite events in connection to this workshop:

• A visit to the Christmas market of Bielefeld
• An interactive session on Interactive Sonification in smart environments that takes place on the 15th of December 2016.
• 4 interactive sonification workshops/tutorials take place on the 15th of December 2016
• A lab tour to the CITEC laboratories takes place on the 15th of December 2016
• A social dinner that takes place on the 16th of December 2016.

For more details about these satellite events please read the workshop programme.

 

Tutorials

On the 15th of December 2016, we offer four tutorial sessions on a variety of subjects. In these tutorials, participants will not only be able to learn about the interactive systems but also put in your sonification skill and design your own mini projects.

1) BRIX₂ – Sebastian Zehe (Bielefeld University)

 

BRIX₂ is a compact, modular Physical Computing prototyping platform. It allows users to easily attach different sensors and actuators to their computer or build completely standalone applications that sense the physical world and react to it.

The BRIX₂ kit consists of the base module as well as different extension modules which can be stacked onto the base module as easy as Lego®. With BRIX₂, users are able to sense motion, orientation, temperature, humidity, light intensity and proximity. The system can generate real-time feedback and alerts in three different modalities: auditory, haptic and visual. Internal batteries allow for standalone applications and the BRIX₂ RF interface enables users you to send data wirelessly from one module to another.

In the BRIX₂ workshop, participants will be able to try out the kit and develop their own applications. We will focus especially on using BRIX₂ and its sensors as a data source for interactive sonifications. Prior knowledge and experience with Arduino, Microcontrollers and Electronics is appreciated, but absolutely not required.

 

2) HoloR: Interactive Mixed Reality Room  - Carsten Schwede (Bielefeld University)  

 

HoloR - short for Holographic Room is a stereoscopic, multi-person, multi-viewer, spatial projected augmented reality system, which enables applications to fade between different parts of the mixed-reality spectrum. In the workshop, we will explore the use of the movement tracking system, holographic display and sptial audio to design interactive movement sonification and other possibilities. 

 

3) Interactive Sonification of Body Motion Qualities - Roberto Bresin (KTH), Emma Frid (KTH), Ludvig Elblaus (KTH), Maurizio Mancini (University of Genova), Stefano Piana (University of Genova)

 

The focus of this hands-on workshop is on the interactive sonification of body motion qualities. We will provide data from motion capture recordings of dancers moving with different qualities (e.g. fluid, rigid) in three different formats, videos, data files, and real-time streaming via OSC.

Three are the main activities that you can choose to work with at the workshop 

1. Make your own sonifications of motion data provided by using your own sonification tools
2. Identify and discuss sounds (for example from freesound.org for) which best represent the body motion qualities represented in the provided videos (e.g. fluid, rigid)
3. Fine tune existing sound synthesis models (provided at the workshop), by real-time manipulation of their parameters

At the end of the workshop participants will play their sonification to participants at the workshop.

This workshop is supported by the EU-funded DANCE project 

4) Business Process Sonification - Tobias Hildebrandt (University of Vienna)

Business processes can take a variety of forms, e.g. for handling insurance claims, guiding and monitoring the steps that users take by browsing and ordering products on a webshop, or controlling the steps of an industrial production process. During runtime, for each performed process step a log entry is created. Depending on the domain and the nature of a process, hundreds of thousands or more of such entries can aggregate over the course of a day. With current means focused on machine learning and visualization it is sometimes difficult to analyze this data in order to detect patterns and trends, bottlenecks, anomalies, deviations and malfunctions or to derive other business-related information. We have developed a prototype that combines interactive sonification and visualization for the analysis of process event logs.

In this session, you assume the role of a webshop owner who wants to analyze his/her accumulated process data with our tool. In the course of the session you will learn the structure and peculiarities of business process data, and how to analyze it. We will further think about the design of novel sonification and interaction techniques for this domain, which might also serve as inspirations for sonifications of other data of similar structure.

 

Call for Papers

Interactive Sonification is the specialized research topic concerned with the use of sound to portray data, but where there is a person at the heart of an interactive control loop. This workshop encourages submissions for oral or poster presentations that deal with:

• Interfaces between humans and auditory displays
• Reproducible research in Interactive Sonification
• Applications of Interactive Sonification
• Tightly closed multimodal interaction loops and their perception
• Evaluation of performance, usability, multi-modality of interactive systems that include auditory feedback
• Sonification for data analysis and data mining
• Computational models of sonification
• Practical systems and working prototypes
• Signal and audio processing algorithms for audio synthesis
• Long-term usage compatibility of Interactive Sonification, including aesthetics and acceptance
• Sonifications in collaborative contexts

We invite two forms of presentation:

• Full Papers: 20 minutes presentation (15+5), papers in PDF format 4–8 pages.
• Posters: papers in PDF format 4–8 pages, ideally including a demonstration.

To ensure a high quality of the contributions, all papers will go through a double-blind review selection process.

Proceedings and Special Issue

The peer-reviewed publications will be published on interactive-sonification.org and with DOI on Bielefeld University PUB server. Participants are invited to extend their accepted papers to submit to a special issue of an international journal.

Paper Submission

The paper submission process is as follows. First, authors submit a 1-page extended abstract that is reviewed by the organizing committee. Then, the organizing committee selects the most relevant abstracts and notifies authors of their eligibility for full paper submission. Please note that the eligibility for submission is not a guarantee that the paper will be published. Finally, to guarantee a high quality of the contributions, full papers go through a double-blinded review process.

The details about the submission process are as follows:

• For all the above categories please submit a 1-page extended abstract of the proposed paper by June 20th 2016 (extended to June 27th 2016, see important dates below). No template is needed for the abstract submission, but please do not exceed 1-page length, use A4 format, and submit PDF file only.
• Authors will be notified of eligibility for submission by July 15th 2016.
• Authors must submit their full paper (4 to 8 pages) before September 15th 2016 September 23rd 2016.
• Authors will be notified of acceptance by November 1st 2016.
• Accepted papers will be designated either as posters or as lectures.
• The deadline for camera-ready papers is November 15th 23rd 2016.
• Authors must consider reviewer´s comments to submit the final version of the paper.
• Abstracts and full papers are to be submitted at
  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ison2016.
• Please indicate in the abstract if you intend to submit multimedia examples. Submission of videos/sounds is strongly encouraged.
• Authors of accepted papers are asked to prepare their manuscript according to the templates
• For any general enquiries please contact enquiry@interactive-sonification.org.

 

For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for the ISon 2016 conference prior to the author registration deadline (see important dates). Papers with no registered author on the author registration deadline will be removed from the workshop programme and will not appear in the proceedings.

Reviewing Process

The reviewing process of the full paper is double-blinded: authors and reviewers will be anonymous to each other. Therefore, when preparing your manuscript for submission, do not put actual authors names on the first page and avoid excessive or explicit references to your own work. To ensure a high quality of the contributions, the following criteria will be considered:

• Novelty of the paper
• Scholarly/scientific quality
• Appropriateness of topic
• Importance
• Paper organization
• Readability
• Stimulation potential
• Fostering of open source and free software tools/data
• Fostering reproducibility of research
• Contribution to the overall balance of topics at ISon 2016.

After the reviewing process, accepted papers will be designated (by the Programme Committee) either as posters or as lectures. All accepted papers have the same status, assignment as poster or lecture is not indicative of the relevance or potential impact but on the type of content and way to better reach the intended audience.

Paper Templates

For the full paper submission, please submit your paper in PDF format according to one of the following templates:

• LaTeX template (zip, 170KB)
• Word template (doc, 163KB)

Submission Page

The submission website is:

• https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ison2016

Keynote

ISon 2016 will feature a keynote by Prof. Tobias Heed of Bielefeld University.

Title

Space and the Senses: Transformation and Integration

Abstract

Each of our sensory systems is uniquely built. As one consequence, space is coded in very different ways across vision, touch, and audition. Yet, in our everyday experience, we naturally experience touch, sound, and vision in one common 3D world. To achieve such consistency, the brain must transform between the senses's different spatial codes, and it has been a long-standing research aim to determine which spatial coordinate system is the brain's final coding form. I will present experimental results from the areas of multisensory integration and sensorimotor control that demonstrate that, contrary to the assumption of this traditional endeavor, the brain does not convert all input into a common spatial code, but instead entertains many spatial codes in parallel. Often, several such coding schemes are then relevant in a particular task, which can either greatly improve, but also potentially hinder performance. Therefore, spatial coding schemes of the different senses, and the brain's strategies to integrate them, place important constraints on sonification.

Bio

Tobias Heed joined Bielefeld University in September 2016 as Full Professor of Biopsychology & Cognitive Neuroscience. He studied Business Administration in Stuttgart, Germany, before studying Psychology in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany. He received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Hamburg for research in the area of spatial tactile processing. In his early Postdoc years, he spent some time with Pieter Medendorp at the Donders Insititute in Nijmegen, Netherlands, to investigate motor planning for different effector systems. In 2012, he started his own research group in Hamburg, the Reach & Touch Lab, funded by the German Research Foundation's Emmy Noether program. His group's research focus, the integration of tactile processing with motor planning, as well as its development, continues to be the key interest of his new lab in Bielefeld.

Information for Presenters

The day and time of the presentation will be available on the conference programme (coming soon).

Poster presentation of papers:

Time:

• Posters will be hung in specific spaces at the venue for the whole day. Presenters are expected to be near their poster at the dedicated poster session.

Poster dimensions:

• The maximum dimensions of the poster should not exceed ISO A0 size (maximum height = 1189mm, maximum width = 841mm).
•  
• Posters will be hung in Portrait format.
• Poster PDF will be collected and made available with the papers on the ISon website.

Poster stand assignment:

• Each poster presenter will be assigned to a particular stand. Put up your poster on the stand that displays your paper title.

Sound:

• Sound examples should only be played through headphones. Presenters are expected to bring their own headphones and playing device. Loudspeakers will not be allowed.

Miscellaneous:

• Specific technical requirements should be asked to the conference organization (enquiry@interactive-sonification.org) before December 1st 2016.

 

Oral presentation of papers:

Time:

• Each paper has an allocation of 20 minutes for presentation, 15 minutes for the speech and 5 minutes for Q&As.

Presentation devices:

• The room will be equipped with a video projector (VGA connector), an audio output (stereo minijack), and a microphone.
• Presenters are encouraged to use their personal computers for presentations but a computer will be also available.
• Presenters should check their equipment in the break before their session and be available for chatting with the session chair.

Presentation content:

• Make sure to include sound examples when possible and to prepare a lively presentation.

Miscellaneous:

• Specific technical requirements should be asked to the conference organization (enquiry@interactive-sonification.org) before November 25th 2016.

 

Important Dates

• Extended abstract deadline: June 20th 2016 => extended to June 27th 2016.
• Notification of eligibility for submission: July 15th 2016.
• Full paper submission deadline: September 15th 2016 September 23rd 2016.
• Notification of acceptance: November 1st 2016.
• Deadline for camera-ready papers: November 20th 23rd 2016.
• Deadline for early/author registration: November 20th 23rd 2016.
• Special technical requirements request: December 10th 2016.
• Satellite event: 4 tutorials / mini-workshops and lab tour: December 15th 2016.
• ISon 2016 workshop: December 16th 2016.

 

Registration

Remember that, for each paper, at least one author must be registered for the conference by November 20th23rd 2016. If none of the authors is registered by this date, the paper will be removed from the conference proceedings.

Registrations to the ISon2016 workshop include:

• Attendance to all paper sessions, posters and keynote.
• mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks on the 15th and/or 16th of December.
• Meals on the 15th and/or 16th of December.
• 1 ticket for the workshop get-together dinner on the 16th of December.

 

Prices:

Early registration, before November 20th23rd 2016:

• 90€ non-student and student registrations.

Late registration, after November 20th23rd 2016:

• 120€ non-student and student registrations.

Registration Procedure:

To register, please send an email to Susanne Strunk with Subject "ISon 2016 registration" providing your full name and the address to be used in the invoice.
To facilitate our planning, please indicate in your email also whether you will join the informal get-together on December 14th (at 7p.m. at Nichtschwimmer Bielefeld), (google maps) and whether you participate to the ISon 2016 social dinner on December 16th in Pappelkrug Bielefeld.
You will then receive the printed invoice while you're here in Bielefeld.

As to the payment, we have the following procedures (for EU / non-EU members).

For EU Members:

• Please transfer the registration fee to

  Universität Bielefeld
  Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen, Girozentrale, NL Düsseldorf
  Short Name: Ld Bk Hes.-Thür Gz, Dus
  Bank Code: 300 500 00
  BIC Code: WELADEDD
  IBAN: DE46 3005 0000 0000 0610 36

• When making the payment it is of paramount importance to specify the reason for transfer correctly as:

  F40900109 + your name

  - otherwise the money will not be routed to our account.

• Please print a copy of the payment transaction and bring that copy with you to the ISon 2016 workshop

 

For Non-EU Members:

• Please pay the registration fee on-site.
• We apologize that for this on-site registration you can only pay cash, and we cannot accept credit cards.

 

Location

The ISon 2016 will take place at CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany: http://cit-ec.de

Accommodation

Important note:

Please note that We are not able to organize any block-booked cheap accommodation. Participants will have to arrange their own travel and accommodation. We advise you to book accommodation early as it can be very difficult to find last-minute accommodation in Bielefeld.

Hotels:

Here you can find some convenient hotels:

• B&B Hotel Bielefeld, Europaplatz 2, 3613 Bielefeld
  Single Room: 54 EUR + breakfast 7,50 EUR
• Comfort Garni Hotel Stadt Bremen, Bahnhofstraße 32, 33602 Bielefeld, Single Room: 66 EUR + breakfast 10 EUR
• Arcadia Hotel Bielefeld Niederwall 31-35, 33602 Bielefeld Single Room: 79 EUR + breakfast 12.90 EUR
• Hotel Bielefelder Hof Am Bahnhof 3, 33602 Bielefeld Single Room: 105 EUR + breakfast 15 EUR

 

Programme

Wednesday, 14th December 2016

For those who arrive on Wednesday, we will meet for some food and drink at Nichtschwimmer restaurant at 7pm ((google maps)). You can either let us know in advance or just simply show up. We will be there at least for a few hours.

Thursday, 15th December 2016

09:00	Registration at the registration desk of CITEC
09:30	Welcome
09:45	Parallel Workshop Session 1 HoloR: interactive mixed reality room Business process sonification
12:00	Lunch Break
13:30	Parallel Workshop Session 2 BRIX2, modular physical computing prototyping for sonification design Movement Fluidity
15:45	Coffee Break
16:15	Lab Tour
18:00	Bielefeld's Christmas Market

Friday, 16th December 2016

09:00	Registration
09:30	Welcome
09:45	Keynote
10:20	Paper Session 1 Lowering the barriers to the creation of interactive auditory displays: an experimental investigation Doon Macdonald and Tony Stockman
10:40	Coffee Break
11:10	Paper Session 2 Sonification of fluidity - an exploration of perceptual connotations of a particular movement feature Emma Frid, Ludvig Elblaus and Roberto Bresin Interactive sonification of the U-disparity maps of 3D scenes Piotr Skulimowski, Mateusz Owczarek, Andrzej Radecki, Michal Bujacz and Pawel Strumillo Sonifying the periphery: supporting the formation of gestalt in air traffic control Niklas Rönnberg, Jonas Lundberg and Jonas Löwgren Interactive sonification of movement qualities - a case study of fluidity  Antonio Camurri, Andrea Cera, Stefano Piana, Corrado Canepa, Paolo Alborno, Gualtiero Volpe, Ksenia Kholikalova, Radoslaw Niewiadomski and Maurizio Mancini
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Paper Session 3 Discrimination of tremor diseases by interactive sonification Marian Weger, David Pirrò, Alexander Wankhammer and Robert Hoeldrich Interactive sonification for structural biology and structure-based drug design Holger Ballweg, Agnieszka Bronowska and Paul Vickers Heart alert: ECG sonification for supporting the detection and diagnosis of ST segment deviations Andrea Aldana, Thomas Hermann and Steffen Grautoff Collaborative study of interactive seismic array sonification for data exploration and public outreach activities Masaki Matsubara, Yota Morimoto and Takahiko Uchide
15:20	Poster Craze
15:30	Coffee Break
15:45	Poster Session Interactive sonification for visual dense data displays Niklas Rönnberg and Jimmy Johansson Interactive sonification of colour images on mobile devices for blind persons - preliminary concepts and first tests Andrzej Radecki, Michal Bujacz, Piotr Skulimowski and Pawel Strumillo La Macchina v0.6: realtime sonification of a painted conveyor paper belt Alessandro Inguglia and Sylviane Sapir  An exploration of interaction techniques for the presentation of foreground and background items in auditory displays David Dewhurst and Tony Stockman Slowification: an in-vehicle auditory display providing speed guidance through spatial panning Jan Hammerschmidt and Thomas Hermann Interactive Sonification of Gait: Realtime BioFeedback for People with Parkinson’s Disease  Margaret Schedel, Lisa Muratori, Jay Loomis, Tzvia Pinkhasov, Ilene Berger Morris and Erin Vasudevan
17:15	Panel Discussion
17:55	Closing Words
18:30	Social Dinner