Across Fields: Sound, art and technology from an electromechanical perspective

Sound art is a difficult to categorise and broad genre description that draws together modes of creative practice which use sound as a medium or a subject. The field is considered to be critically underrepresented and under-theorised despite an increase of attention and popularity since the 1990s (Licht 2007, 2001, Cox 2009). This is partly as a consequence of an analytical and historical emphasis on textual and conceptual approaches which dominated the arts through the 1970s and 1980s (Cox 2011, 2013). In particular, acknowledgement of the influence of object-based and kinetic sculpture within the field of sound art is found to be inadequate (Chau 2014, Keylin 2015). This thesis presents an original body of sound art practice as a means through which to uncover and explore connections between sound art, experimental composition, kinetic art and sculpture. The term 'electromechanical' is used to identify this work, highlighting its particular concerns with the use of electrically animated or amplified materials. Through the production, exhibition, critical appraisal and contextualisation of the work new observations and distinctions within the field are presented. These include the identification of a 'closed system aesthetic' and the distinction between robotic and process driven approaches to electromechanical sound art. A further contribution to the field consists of a detailed consideration of sound art emerging from an intersection of experimental music and sculptural practices during the 1960s. The original works produced for the project, and their production are documented and described in detail alongside existing canonical and contemporary examples of sound art. Analysis of these works is informed by materialist and object-orientated critical positions, and science and technology studies. The method of art practice as research is described and extended in an original way that encompasses and applies a systems approach to creative practice.

The sound art scene is not limited to the northern hemisphere. Rather, it is globally distributed and has for decades also appeared in various manifestations and constellations in the Global South. Globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonization are therefore issues that are just as crucial to the field of sound art as they are for other fields of social and human science. These issues are slowly beginning to enter the academic studies of sound art. However, academic interest in these issues still does not equal what we find empirically in the field. If one surfs the Internet or travels abroad to visit urban areas in the southern hemisphere, one is likely to encounter artists and communities creating works of contemporary sound art. Some of these artists involve themselves in independent long-term collaborations across the hemispheres, while others work within or supported by public institutions, but by far the majority of them are organized in local independent groups or social movements. Curators in the Global North have noted this proliferation and have, in recent years, begun to expand the repertoire of sound art by inviting artists from the Global South to perform and exhibit at cutting-edge festivals and galleries. Many of these transhemispheric collaborations have emerged from particular historical, institutional, and social contexts and take place within a growing critical awareness of postcolonial and decolonial issues. I suggest that these changes require the development of new analytical and theoretical tools within the study of sound art, tools that allow for a rewriting of the history and theory of sound art from a truly global perspective. Such a rewriting of sound art history and sound art practices will have to be acutely aware of issues of globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonialization; it will need to integrate representations on the Internet with those of live concerts, installations, and interviews; it must reach out toward anthropological and ethno-musicological methods; and it should make aesthetic considerations central to its analysis.This chapter, and this section of the book in general, is a modest attempt to begin the work of learning to pay analytical attention to these global shifts and experiments in sound art. The ambition is not to map the entire world of sound arts, nor is it to develop a new fully fledged set of methodological and theoretical tools. The intention is simply to pay attention to these global changes, and through this to start a discussion about the paradigmatic shift that is long overdue in contemporary sound art studies. (Less)

Since the 1950s the spatiality of sound has become a key concept in different fields of artistic practice, emerging as one of the most relevant subjects in the contemporary arts. Ideas related to sound and space have been used in different discourses and practices to refer to or to explore perceptually different facets of the spatiality of sound. In the field of fine art they have been associated with the emergence of sound art, while in music, they have been associated with spatial music. In spite of this widespread interest in sound and space, the uses of spatial concepts in relation to sound and music have been inconsistent, with different authors and practitioners referring to different aspects of the complex relationship between the two. In this article I suggest a typology with five categories to describe five meanings of space I identified in the recent literature of music and sound art: metaphor, acoustic space, sound spatialisation, reference and location. With this typology I expect to clarify the contemporary uses of space and spatial concepts in music and sound art.

This article explores an initiative aimed at fostering a culture of electronic music and sound arts in Peru, focusing on the Open Science project, Circuito Abierto (2022–2024). It explores how Circuito Abierto , an annual artistic residency rooted in Open Science culture and organised by the Laboratorio de Música Electroacústica y Arte Sonoro at the Universidad Nacional de Música (UNM, formerly the Conservatorio Nacional de Música ), challenged traditional and conservative educational structures within Peru’s academic landscape. The project promoted an open, collaborative approach to music creation, aimed at bridging the gap between academic and popular music scenes in the education of electronic music. Circuito Abierto may serve as a case study for addressing broader historical challenges in Peruvian music education, particularly with regard to music technology and experimental electronic sound art practices.

This article examines Cloud (2017), a sound art installation by Christina Kubisch that aims to make digital infrastructure audible. In works such as this one and the similar Electrical Walks series, Kubisch employs custom-built headphones that transform electromagnetic energy into sound, allowing listeners to hear the operation of the otherwise imperceptible network technologies of cloud computation. I consider Kubisch’s approach within the field of sound art and the legacy of John Cage and R. Murray Schafer that privilege hearing as a revelatory sense through which individuals can best perceive their embodied relationship to the physical environment. I argue that Cloud is indicative of a recent tendency to emphasize and figure the power of hearing to apprehend invisible systems of network infrastructures as exemplified in phenomenological and affective theories of digital media. I examine the shared conceptual lineage linking notions of aural and digital cultures in the crisis of visuality that was central to postmodern thought.

This audio paper draws on analysis of a case study within the field of artistic research. In summer 2018, the project sent poet Gunnar D. Hansson, composer Anders Hultqvist and ecological sound artists Stefan Ostersjo and Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir on a search for the sounds of the book Tapeshavet (Hansson, 2017). The work links to the author’s Activation Series, which employs the artistic method of activation through a practice of performative responsivity to an environment. It therefore falls under the field of ecological sound art. Through an ecological approach, relations and behaviour are however reconfigured through the phenomena of ‘performance’. The aim of this paper is to unpack the impact of such expansion of the performative body. This is done using new analytical tools, namely fleshy listening (Stefansdottir & Ostersjo, 2019) and multi-entity performance (Rawlings, personal communication, 2019; Stefansdottir, 2019, 2020). The paper is therefore set to bring forth a more fluid understanding of performance, the curatorial and of sound art. But also, to provide the field with analytical tools as well as a technique and conceptual stance that may be of use in our times, when we critically look at what making sound means in current and future conditions. The paper references data/documentation from the case study, gathered on site in June 2018 by Anders Hultqvist, Stefan Ostersjo and Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir. Other sound sources (audio-video work, binaural compositions, sound files from installations) can be located in the bibliography list. In that instance it should be noted that improvisers and vocal performers in the installation Fjarilarna steg upp (2020) are Sofia Hardig, Felicia Konrad and Liv Kaastrup Vesterskov. The ambisonic documentation of that installation features also the sounds of multiple epipedobates tricolor, residing at the tropical palm house of The Botanical Garden, Lund, Sweden. In addition, the audio paper also includes a fragment from Concert of Sound of Mull (2019), performed by Maja Jantar, angela rawlings and Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir.

Sound studies examines concepts, practices, and technologies of sound and listening in different historical and cultural contexts. It is considered a relatively new field, emerging in the first few years of the 21st century. However, texts from the late 20th century—notably Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985) and R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World and Our Sonic Environment (1994)—have been central to the formation and development of sound studies. Common areas of study include sound technologies and media, philosophies of sound and listening, and soundscapes and sound environments. Sound-studies scholarship also addresses specific aspects of auditory culture, such as noise, silence, loudness, vocality, speech, sound art, and music, and their imbrication with ethical, political, and ecological relations. A central contestation of the field is the importance of sound and aurality to the historical developments associated with modernity. Sound studies have sought to challenge the ocularcentric tendencies of cultural and critical analysis, and the associated dualisms of hearing/seeing and sound/vision. Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary in its scope, research in sound studies works in and across history, musicology, sociology, cinema studies, literary studies, disability studies, American studies, geography, anthropology, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, architecture, gender studies, critical race studies, and art history. Consequently, the field’s analytic approaches and methods are diverse. However, it has often been Eurocentric, centering the West and the white, male innovator. There is a growing body of work that engages with the racial and gendered dimensions of sound and has sought to expand the remit of sound studies beyond the colonial core.

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activities, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. These volumes gather scholarship on improvisation from a similarly wide range of perspectives, with contributions from more than 60 scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

This article focuses upon artistic modalities for the dissemination of personal and intimate memories to examine the relationship between technology, performance and audience. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from social science and performance studies, sound art and computer science, the discussion is contextualised by combining three different perspectives. In doing so, the article concentrates on the authors’ collaborative and ongoing performance project Love Letters. The piece invited the participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion; share other audiences’ letters and interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting names, memories, and streams of consciousness to the costume and onto the performer’s body. Love Letters was recently augmented with creative technologies and redeveloped as an interactive sound installation that’s both content and curation is user-generative. Through contextualising the performance project, this article investigates the different types of interfaces used in the performance (considering both their cultural and biological significance): body, skin and dress, which have been used to communicate written narrative. Viewing the project from a ubiquitous computing standpoint, we focus on the role of technology in such a setting. However, the primary importance is not the technology in itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. Through our case study we propose how pervasive technology can support reminiscing and facilitate a sustainability in performative settings such as storytelling practices, while not drawing attention away from the performative and storytelling aspects of the piece.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology–based intelligent robots are constructed using different technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data, deep learning, machine learning, neural network, and expert system. This particular type of robots can increase the work efficiency of humans and improve their quality of life. From the industry perspective, AI robots possess unlimited potential for development, and they are projected to be a 10-trillion-dollar industry. In this study, the critical technology of IoT is applied to develop a teaching module for an IoT smart home robot. Teaching and evaluation are performed through an embedded thematic-approach teaching strategy in the course named Automatic Measurement and Monitoring. This research aims to teach students how to integrate IoT technology into robot design and construction to build IoT smart home robots. This cross-disciplinary research incorporates emerging technology—integration of smart home, robot construction, and IoT technologies—into industrial education, teaching material and equipment development, and experimental teaching and evaluation. The participating students were juniors or seniors from the Department of Electrical Engineering or Electromechanical Engineering at the University of Technology.

Ecotechnology is both broad and widespread, yet it has never been given a universally shared definition; this remains the case even in the early 21st century. Given that it is used in the natural, engineering, and social sciences, as well as in design studies, in the philosophy and history of technology and in science policy, perhaps this is not surprising. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous definition for ecotechnology: It should be understood rather as an umbrella term that facilitates connections among different scientific fields and science policy and, in so doing, offers a robust trading zone of ideas and concepts. The term is part of a cultural and sociopolitical framework and, as such, wields explanatory power. Ecotechnology approaches argue for the design of ensembles that embed human action within an ecologically functional environment and mediating this relationship by technological means. Related terms, such as ecotechnics, ecotechniques, ecotechnologies, and eco-technology, are used similarly. In the 1970s, “ecotechnology,” along with other terms, gave a voice to an unease and a concern with sociotechnical transformations. This eventually gave rise to the first global environmental movement expressing a comprehensive eco-cultural critique of society-environment relations. Ecotechnology was part of the language used by activists, as well as by social theorists and natural scientists working in the transdisciplinary field of applied ecology. The concept of ecotechnology helped to both establish and “smooth over” environmental matters of concern in the worlds of economics, science, and policymaking. The process of deliberation about a green modernity is still ongoing and characterizes the search for a constructive intermediation between artificial and natural systems following environmentally benign design principles. During the 1980s, disciplinary endeavors flourished in the global academic world, lending ecotechnology more and more visibility. Some of these endeavors, such as restoration ecology and ecological engineering, were rooted in the engineering sciences, but mobilized quite different traditions, namely population biology and systems biology. To date, ecotechnology has been replaced by and large by other terms in applied ecology. Another strand of work resulted in the discipline of social ecology, which developed different focal points, most notably critical political economy and a concern with nature-culture issues in the context of cultural ecology. Finally, more recently, ecotechnology has been discussed in several branches of philosophy that offer different narratives about the epistemic and ontological transformations triggered by an “ecologization” of societies and a theoretical turn toward relationality.

PREFACEICMEAS 2018 was held in Beijing, China during 12-14 October, 2018, which is organized by Engineering Science and Hong Kong Society of Mechanical Engineers (HKSME), supported by Capitol Technology University. The conference provides a useful and wide platform both for displaying the latest research and for exchanging of research results and thoughts in broad Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Science and Engineering, Automation Science and other topics. The participants of the conference were from almost every part of the world, with background of either academia or industry, even well-known enterprise. The success and prosperity of the conference is reflected by high level of the papers received.The proceeding is a compilation of the accepted papers which represents an interesting outcome of the conference. This book covers 3 chapters: Mechanical; Manufacturing; Engineering Science and Materials Science.We would like to acknowledge all of those who supported ICMEAS 2018. Each individual and institutional help was very important for the success of this conference. Especially we would like to thank the organizing committee for their valuable advices in the organization and helpful peer review of the papers.We sincerely hope that ICMEAS 2018 will be a forum for excellent discussions that will put forward new ideas and promote collaborative researches. We are sure that the proceedings will serve as an important research source of references and the knowledge, which will lead to not only scientific and engineering progress but also other new products and processes.Conference Committee Co-chairsDu Ruxu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong KongIan McAndrew, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, UKKai Cheng, Brunel University, UKMohd Hamdi Bin Abd Shukor, University of Malaya, Malaysia

Commercialization of knowledge developed in universities is usually associated with the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). There is, however, a growing interest in fostering utilization and commercialization of research associated with the fields of social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA) among universities, academics, knowledge exchange practitioners and funders (Ulrichsen and Athanassopoulou 2024). The SHAPE taskforce on commercialization of SSHA research was initiated in early 2022 by the business unit managers from Open Entrepreneurship and Spin-outs DK – two initiatives aimed at bolstering the commercialization of research from the eight Danish universities. During 2022 the taskforce extended from five university representatives to eight. In early 2023 the taskforce applied for funds from the InnoTech Group (Universities Denmark’s working group on innovation and technology transfer) to establish a project to assess the potential of strengthening the utilization of SSHA research from Danish universities. The project is driven by the SHAPE taskforce with support from the Open Entrepreneurship Central Unit at DTU. As part of this project, the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy (CFA) at Aarhus University was commissioned to undertake a preliminary study of existing knowledge on the commercialization of SSHA research, also referred to as Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy (SHAPE) research. The overall project, including this report from CFA, was funded by the InnoTech Group, Universities Denmark’s working group on innovation and technology transfer.

Engineering is a specially designed course that includes the application of knowledge explicitly in the field of science and natural phenomena. The fields of engineering, technology, and physical sciences have been growing towards a new era of development and innovation across the globe. They include many fields, and one such significant area is mechanical engineering, which deals with the construction, working principles, and applications of various types of machines. Technical data of the products based on their scientific principles, along with parameters, are involved in the development of mechanical engineering. With this background, this study is designed to look forward to the future directions and emerging technologies in mechanical engineering. This review study investigated the future direction and emerging technology in mechanical engineering. It also highlighted the purpose and significance of mechanical engineering and discussed some of the research questions in mechanical engineering. Future directions of learning and technology, mechanical invention and development, the transportation industry, electric vehicles, and the artificial intelligence industrial revolution are also mentioned in this study. Mechanical engineering is a growing field of technology across the world. This review study indicated that it is essential to have upgraded knowledge and skills in the field of engineering and technology in this modern era. Many theories can be applied in the mechanical field with the support of upgrades in technology. The direction of mechanical engineering study is to learn the mechanical aspects of different technologies and the knowledge about that technology to optimize its use.

PrefaceInternational Conference on Design, Engineering and Computer Sciences 2018 (ICDECS 2018) held on 9th August 2018 in JS Luwansa Hotel and Convention Center, Jakarta Indonesia. ICDECS 2018 was organized and hosted by Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science and Faculty of Art and Design Universitas Mercu Buana Jakarta.The first ICDECS 2018 aims to provide a platform for participants an interdisciplinary research and innovations from academia and industry with related topics in the field of Engineering; Computer Science; Art and Design. The conference provides a high level national and international research for scholars, scientists, researchers, and engineers to present their results in the field of engineering, computer science and art and design. The issue covers all the aspects of engineering from mechanical, electric and electronic, civil, architect, industrial engineering as well as in the filed of computer science, art and design.The editors hope that this issue will provide the reader a broad overview of the recent and relevant field of the above disciplines. The editors would like to express their sincere appreciations and thanks to all the committee members of the ICDECS 2018 for their excellent efforts. Thanks also to IOP Conference Series for producing the issue with full articles.Conference ChairDr. Setiyo Budiyanto, MT.List of Editorial Board, Organizing Committee and Photos are available in this PDF