Sound Design for the Pluriverse - A Design Exploration of Sonic Hermeneutic Affordances of Interactive Things
D. Hug · 2024
As designed sound permeates our daily lives, sound designers deal not only with questions of aesthetics, perception and cognition, but with cultural, social, ethical and political implications of their creations.As a result, more and more attention is being paid to the sound design process and its impact on the creation of meaningful sonic experiences, especially in participatory design settings.However, relatively little is known about how meaning is constructed and shared in sound design and listening experiences outside of codified and formalized media such as film, videogames or music.This paper summarises the findings from a grounded theory study on the emergence and co-construction of meaning in speculative prototyping and co-interpretation activities.I will outline dominant interpretive reference points, cultural biases, and stereotypes that I refer to as hermeneutic affordances.This work contributes to conceptual and methodological approaches to pluriversal sound design by uncovering the diversity of aesthetic, cultural and narrative references and biases in sound design, using methods for commoning of design and interpretation of sounds.