Jason Freeman

Call for Entries: Sonification Competition for ICAD 2012

Composers, sound artists, and sonification researchers are invited to create sonifications for the ICAD 2012 sonification competition.

The 18th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2012) will be held June 18-22, 2012, at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the heart of midtown Atlanta, Georgia. The event will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st International Conference on Auditory Display. Since 1992, ICAD has been the premier international venue for the dissemination and discussion of work related to the science, art, and practice of sound as a communicative display. Through its active Sonification Lab and Center for Music Technology, Georgia Tech is pleased to host ICAD's vibrant community of researchers and practitioners on its campus.

ICAD 2004 titled its sonification competition ‘Listening to the Mind Listening’ and invited entrants to sonify EEG data captured while a subject was listening to music. The ICAD 2012 competition is inspired by this same idea: music (or sound) about listening to music. It is also inspired by the radical changes over the past decade in how we listen to music and how we share our listening activities with others. As portable media players and always-connected smartphones have become our primary listening platforms, social media services have become our primary sharing platforms.

This competition adopts the theme ‘Listening to the World Listening’ as it challenges us to explore what we can learn about listening through the analysis and sonification of social media data about listening.

There is no static data set for this competition; instead, entrants are invited to use a set of data APIs to obtain social media listening data. Use of a Twitter Music Trends data feed, which aggregates music listening data from Twitter by artist, is required. Entrants may optionally gather related data about the tweets themselves from the Twitter API, and about the referenced artists from the MusicBrainz and Echo Nest APIs. Detailed information about each API is included in the full call at 

http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/.

Sonifications may be fixed-media audio files, interactive software programs or web sites, smartphone apps, musical performances, or sound installations. They may sonify the data in real time or out of real time. They may work with as little as a single set of fifty artists from Twitter Music Trends or as much as several months worth of data collected across all of the APIs.

Submissions must include an audio or video recording, no more than five minutes in length, of the complete sonification, excerpts from the sonification, or documentation of the sonification, as appropriate. Submissions must also include a 2-4 page statement, following the ICAD 2012 paper template, that describes the techniques used to create the sonification and the motivations behind them.

All questions should be addressed to Jason Freeman, ICAD 2012 Music Chair.

A jury will select finalists to be featured during ICAD 2012, and the winner will be announced during the conference. The statements of each finalist will also be published in the ICAD conference proceedings.

Alberto de Campo, Professor of Computational Art, Universität der Künste Berlin

R. Luke Dubois, Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, NYU-Poly

Adam Lindsay, chief scientist, SocialGenius

Brian Whitman, co-founder and CTO, The Echo Nest

Full Details on the data sources and the competition are available at:

There is no static data set for this competition; instead, entrants are invited to use a set of data APIs to obtain social media listening data. Use of a Twitter Music Trends data feed, which aggregates music listening data from Twitter by artist, is required. Entrants may optionally gather related data about the tweets themselves from the Twitter API, and about the referenced artists from the MusicBrainz and Echo Nest APIs. Detailed information about each API is included in the full call at http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/.

http://distributedmusic.gatech.edu/icad/


[ot] Call for Entries: ICAD 2012 Sonification Competition