Sound is not my specialty. I don’t play any musical instruments. I can’t sing. I can hardly keep a good beat going. But I love sound. Sound is a powerful force. Sound as music can create many reactions. Physically it can make you move, it can make you jump, dance, cringe, or sleep. Music can also induce emotional states. It can make you feel depressed, or sad, or nostalgic. It can make you feel angry, or aggravated, and it can also make you happy, joyous, and friendly.

However, what I find really interesting about sound is its ability to indicate, to direct, and to control people. Video games in particular are filled with sounds. They create vital feedback to the user. For instance, when selecting different option, a sound is produced to indicate that an action has occurred. When a special ability has been collected or a challenge completed, it would be sinful and downright lame to tell the player they have leveled up with plain text. Some sort of sound is required to  Or another example: the spaceship. A spaceship interface is filled with various beeps, boops, and blips that help the pilots understand what they have pressed. Sound can indicated initialization, danger, warning, proximity, ejection. Sound is a powerful and important sense that adds depth to our visual environment. Sound can do things that visuals can’t accomplish because our eyes are always maintaining focus. Sound constructs a peripheral environment that we can be enacted on or act upon. Loud, annoying alarms wake us up when we are sleeping. We can be focusing intently on one thing, but a sound can break our attention and tell us that something else is more important.

 

Bellow are a few sketch ideas.

 

1. A rotating, glowing lamp that responds to noise.

2. Working in the laser lab can become very overwhelming when there are people coming in for appointments, people coming in to ask questions, and people trying to make walk in appointments all at the same time. Even with three staff, there are occasions where we have difficulty handling everyones questions. To combat that and make it a little easier for staff, we could eliminate the need to argue with walk in students over whether or not they can use a machine by displaying names on a board outside. The board could also display when a machine is free to use – and for how long.

 

 

 

3. Not sold on this idea, but it was an idea non-the-less. The fridge screams “YOU WIN” whenever someone opens the door. There’s no reason behind it.

4. This would be quite challenging to do, but would make an AWESOME halloween costume. A fog machine would be attached to the wearers back in addition to a giant battery (how else would you keep it running?). A temperature sensor would be attached to the wearers forehead. When their forehead temp increases, the machine will blow steam out.

5. This is an extension of my previous project. This project