Sonic Efforts: the expression of walking through sound

Background: Movement based interaction using auditory feedback has the potential to sensitize people to the habitual ways of moving and the expression of effort in everyday physical activities such as walking. Much existing work tends to emphasise corrective auditory feedback to walking and gait analysis, to enhance or correct performance in sporting or rehabilitation contexts. An alternative approach is to consider auditory feedback to encourage playful and expressive ways of standing and walking to raise kinaesthetic awareness and draw attention to micro-movements and the somatic principles of movement awareness. “Still Moving” Françoise, J., et al. (2017), draws attention to the act of standing, by adaptively zooming in on muscular activity to amplify stillness through auditory feedback. Contribution: There is an emerging trend in the use of auditory feedback, in Movement based interaction, to encourage a creative dialogue between the movement and the features and textures in this feedback. Sonic Efforts was an interactive installation of pressure-sensitive sound-generating surface as a proof-of-concept, with four different harmonic sound treatments resulting in noticeable variations in how members of the general public creatively engaged with their walking. The contribution of this work was in “amplifying” these phases to encourage the walker to play with their normal way of walking. Significance: Sonic Efforts was selected by Dr Renee Beale to be part of Extrasensory, a public exhibition that explored the future of human perception through interactive experiments and exhibits. Extrasensory was the premier Melbourne event presented by the Victorian Science Week Coordinating Committee for National Science Week 2019 (with 434 events held across Victoria). Extrasensory was featured in commercial and social media with including Channel 10 and Channel 9 and Radio interviews with the curator Renee Beale on ABC 774, Triple R, Triple J.