Hi everyone! I'm very happy to present you today SonicHoop,
using interactive sonification to support aerial hoop practices.
This is in collaboration with my amazing co-authors: Artem, Demo, Emmanuel, Wendy, Michel and Fred.
So aerial hoops are circular hanging devices that are first introduced and popularized in circus
artistic performance. Now aerial hoop classes are considered as special fitness programs and are
offered in dance studios and gyms worldwide. The disciplines sits between sports and arts,
and involves an essential instrument that can be augmented. We draw inspiration from the following areas:
systems to support physical training in HCI, interactive sonification in sports,
interactive sound systems in digital music and performing arts, and interactive sensing technologies for large surfaces.
I encourage you to see more details in the related work section in the paper.
We used a participatory design approach that included aerial hoop practitioners throughout the process.
We first conducted semi-structured interviews in a dance studio with aerial hoop students and teachers.
We also discussed with optitrack staff at Siggraph 2019 since they organized a live performance of aerial hoop.
Based on this, we derived 4 design goals. And involving hardware engineers and
regular consulting 2 professional aerial hoop teachers, we translated these design
goals into 4 engineering requirements and built SonicHoop prototype using capacitive touch sensing.
Once again, I encourage you to see more details in the paper.
SonicHoop is an interactive aerial hoop that is enabled by 42 electrodes, equally distributed over the hoop,
and are connected to 4 Arduino MPR121 capacitive touch sensors.
We built a I2C communication protocol between arduino sensors and a Bitalino R-IoT,
which streams raw sensor data every 15 milliseconds to a laptop using Wi-Fi.
The raw sensor data, which is a list of 42 floats, is sent to a custom-made Max/MSP program.
We apply a moving average to smooth raw sensor data, and then use a step detection process
to detect touch events and generate sound accordingly.
We explored three sonification strategies which are distinct from each other in terms of musical style and composition strategy.
Sound design ambient divides the hoop into 4 sections, each of which produces a different type
of dense ambient sound corresponding to earth, wind, water, and birds.
Sound design lounge divides the hoop into 10 vertical zones that switch to the music segment assigned to it.
We use a music track in the jazzy lunch house style.
Sound design electro dance divides the hoop into 11 vertical zones and allows to layer 133 bpm loops in an energetic electronic dance music style.
We evaluated the latency between body contact on the hoop and generated auditory feedback.
The total latency is roughly 110 milliseconds. We also evaluated SonicHoop's sensitivity to
different textiles as aerialist wears sports clothes during practice sessions or costumes
for performances. We compared direct skin contact with 5 common textiles.
To see how these different sonification strategies affect aerialist's perception and
choreographic processes, we conducted a structured observation with two professional aerial hoop performers.
Results show that regardless of sound design, SonicHoop improves participants' perceived movement quality.
And depending on the sonification strategy, SonicHoop simultaneously alters participants'
perception while performing and fundamentally changes their choreographic processes:
Instead of translating music into movement, they search for bodily expressions to compose music.
Future work includes exploring other sensing techniques and sonification strategies and testing
them with more participants of different skill levels. We also plan to investigate interactive
sonification in other acrobatic practices to further explore full-body vertical interaction.
Thank you very much for your attention. I'd be happy to take questions.