stephen_barrass
Username: stephen_barrassParticipant details
Research InterestsI co-direct the Sonic Communications Research Group (SCRG) in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra. Our group is currently researching sonic interfaces for wearable and mobile applications, the aesthetics of sonification, sonification of the capital markets, sonification tools, multimodal gestalts, sonic biofeedback and gesture, music cognition and imagination, new interfaces for musical expression, sound design for interactive games, new media in museums, haptic-audio narratives, timbre perception and classification. The SCRG group includes academic researchers, post-docs, doctoral candidates, honours students, visiting researchers, and artists.
My Ph.D. on Auditory Information Design developed a comprehensive method for mapping digital data into auditory information, based on the task and data. A scenario-based cognitive schema links the semiotics of the task and data to the semiotics of the sound design. The lower level perceptual design systematically aligns the characteristics of data with the characteristics of auditory perception. More recently I have been experimenting with perceptual streaming and auditory scene analysis as ways to enable perception of information patterns in multiple temporal streams of data in examples such as an interactive sonification of well-log data, sonifications of mutlichannel brainwave data and in sonifications of the financial markets.
I did a postdoc in the Virtual Reality group at the German National research Institute in Bonn where I worked on interactive sonifications on the Responsive Workbench and CyberStage VR systems. This included the development of OpShop which toured England recently as part of the Experimenta Under the Radar Exhibition of Australian New Media Art.
Recently I collaborated on ZiZi the affectionate couch which is a piece of furniture that purrs when you stroke it. The reaction of audiences to this interface has led me to an interest in the intersection of emotion, bodily sensation, character, narrative, furniture and clothing. Recent threads in this direction include non-visual interfaces for sports, and tactile textiles (taxtiles). In January 2007 I am one of the facilitators of the ANAT reSkin workshop which will explore this area with 25 international participants.
Recent publications include:
Barrass S (2006) Haptic Audio Narrative: from physical simulation to imaginative simulation, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Haptic Audio Interaction Design, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Barrass S. Whitelaw M. and Bailes F. (2006), Listening to the Mind Listening, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 16, 2006, MIT Press, ISSN 0961-1215, Online ISSN: 1531-4812.
Barrass S. (2005) A Perceptual Framework for the Auditory Display of Scientific Data, in Walker B. and Kramer G. (eds) Selected Readings in Sonification, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, Volume 2, Number 4, October 2005, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., ISSN: 1544-3558, pp 389-402.
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