First meeting of WG2

Stockholm 6-7-2007

Meeting participants

Flemming Christensen

Andrew Diey (+ two guests)

Cumhur Erkut

Sandra Pauletto

Stefania Serafin

The first item of the agenda was the discussion of the mandatory tasks of WG2, according to the specifications of the SID proposal.

In particular, the following tasks were approved to be performed:

1) identify companies and interested partners in SID.

2) List of own publications relevant to SID and WG2.

3) List of workshops /conferences /events related to SID.

4) List of projects related to SID.

5) List of software tools for product sound design.

-The SID logo design was discussed and the simpler version proposed by Roberto Bresin was preferred (this item of the agenda will be further discussed during the meeting in Paris in October).

-The meeting started with a discussion of what is product sound design and what are the activities relevant to SID and of interest to the project participants.

The importance of the word "interaction" was stressed.

Conclusion: Interactive products with a salient sonic behavior are the focus of this WG.

Flemming suggested the possibility of having some product sound design recipes.

Which strategies do companies use when doing sound design for products? The common sound design patterns should be documented.

There was also a suggestion/discussion to look into the food industry, since sound is an important parameter of the marketing strategies (a recent paper on the influence of sound on crispness of food was mentioned).

Ben, guest of Andrew working on sound design for games, explained strategies used in sound design. He described how he works as a sound designer, using both intuition and comments from others (but no formal evaluation techniques). Andrew described a 7-stage way of working in sound design.

1- Identify the brief: What is the product / understand projected outcome.

2- Create a sonic mood board

3- Agree Direction, Mood & Feel

4- Generate Ideas, sketches, textures / prototypes

5- Laydown first draft based on feedback from you

6-Refine draft based on your feedback & revisions

7- Deliver final sound for project / -re-evaluate working process at the backend.

This process can be different when talking about products.

Example from Flemming:

How to evaluate car horn systems?

Do novices evaluate in the same way as experts?

Seems like experts' parameters can be transferred to novices (results from

a paper from Aalborg University to be presented at AES 2007 New York) .

A discussion of who is the target group of the WG documentation was intiated.

The common agreement was to find a better connection between academia and industry.

Task for all the members: find 10 brilliant examples of sound design.

Find 5 literature examples of good sound design.

Talk to more people from industry or read their documents to achieve a better understanding of their sound design process.

Another issues which was addressed is the difficulty of a common language in product sound design between different expertises.

In each product sound design how do we approach the psychophysics of sound?

Why does something sound good or bad?

The following disciplines and their relevance to SID were discussed:

Film? No (not interactive)

Games? yes

Mobile telephones (yes)

Sound in Las vegas (casino)

GUI

Interfaces

Sound design x: aesthetics

Information

Entertainment

Navigation

Creation of mood

There was an agreement to focus on non-speech sound.