Interactively Determined Generative Sound Design for Sensate Environments: Extending Cyborg Control

Sensate environments provide a medium for humans to interact with space. This interaction includes ambient/passive triggering, performative artistic interaction and physical sensate spaces used for games and interactive entertainment. This paper examines aural representations of data activated by interaction, shaped by user activities and social environmental behaviours. Generative art forms, for example genetic algorithms and evolutionary design systems, provide methodologies for creating new material. This paper addresses ways in which the generative innovations can relate to human experience in a comprehensible representation using constructs shared by behaviour and sound. The purpose of site-specific generative sound is to respond intelligently to human participants with feedback: sonic indicators of social activity. The affects of the environment contribute to the generative process – the number of occupants, busy-ness (motion), environmental measurements (e.g. temperature, position relative to specific locations in the space) or direct controls – proximity to sensor walls, movement on pressure sensitive flooring. An examination of comprehensible correspondences between sonic parameters and socio-spatial behaviour articulates a methodology for auralisation of social data. Human interaction contributes to the initiation and modification of generative procedures. The central concern – to make generative responsive sound/music clearly indicative of its social context – is applicable in virtual environments as well as wireless sensate physical spaces. Sensate spaces, as a growing and cutting-edge phenomenon at this time, require constructs for expedient computational processing and purposes to which the vast stream of sensed data can be meaningfully applied for the edification of the users.