Audible Sculptures

Urban citizens of Montreal enjoy a great wealth of artistic creations in public space; amongst them we find a great collection of sculptures. These creations visually enrich our daily lives, for example, while walking through an urban park. While the visually impaired community engages strongly with their audible environment, artworks such as sculptures generally remain inaccessible. Motivated by observations during our recent field study with the blind community within the In Situ Audio Services (ISAS) project, we are intrigued by the possibility of rendering for them an acoustic description of physical art forms as an analogue to the experience that sighted individuals receive as they walk down the street. As a concrete example, we want to convey through auditory signals the physical features of one of the many sculptures up in the Mont-Royal mountain, so that a blind individual gains a mental representation of its form, and ideally, an appreciation of its aesthetic [ ... ]

The Acoustic Sculptures project is funded by a Strategic Innovation Fund award from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT).  A project by:

Cooperstock, J. R. – Main advisor
Grond, F.  - Sonic interaction design and project concept
Olmos, A.  - Design research and project concept
Piche, J.; Scavone, G.; Settel, Z. - Advisors
Winters, M. - Support for signal processing