Papers by Marie K Højlund
In this paper we explore how the affective and bodily experience of being the centre of a written... more In this paper we explore how the affective and bodily experience of being the centre of a written shitstorm, can be translated to others through sensification. Through the 3D system Sound-O-Matic3, our installation aims to explore how an auralization of a shit- storm can allow the listeners to be affected by an atmosphere that was earlier only felt by the exposed individual. The paper describes the design process guided by the concept of reasonance through an infræsthetic approach, as a way to explore, how we should not only resonate with the experience, but also critically reflect on the entanglements of resonance and reason. We identify four main refrains in the shitstorm that can be translated into the present through the installation, extending the shitstorm into a new sensory space that we can hear, feel and discuss.
Seismograf, 2022
In September 2020 pop-artist Kh Marie (one of the authors) performed the sensory concert intet er... more In September 2020 pop-artist Kh Marie (one of the authors) performed the sensory concert intet er nok (nothing is enough) in Aarhus, Denmark. The concert invited the audience into a concert experience of sound, scent and movements, creating a space for disorientation of the dominant refrains of the pop-stage. In this article we explore how the physical pop-stage has traditionally been a gendered object in Western culture that orients itself towards certain bodies; and certain bodies towards it, hereby leaving some bodies feeling out of place. The article thus argues that the traditional pop-stage is an example of how gendering of spaces is not only as a discursive orientation, but how it is also a material and affective issue that extends itself out into the subjects and objects that inhabit them. Through repetition of the gendered refrains, they become internalized, like the chorus of a good pop-song stuck in our heads. We analyse the sensory concert as one example of how to challenge the gendered stage that, through an attuning approach, creates tactics of disorientation that allow bodies and stage to resurface as a non-gendered space.
Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to p... more Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to prepare children for the alarming atmosphere they will enter when visiting a hospitalised relative. The complex soundscape dominated by alarms and sounds from equipment is mentioned as the main stressor. As a response to this situation, our design artefact, the interactive furniture Kidkit, invites children to become accustomed to the alarming sounds sampled from the ward while they are waiting in the waiting room. Our design acknowledges how atmospheres emerge as temporal negotiations between the rhythms of the body and the environment in conjunction with our internalised perception of the habituated background. By actively controlling the sounds built into Kidkit, the child can habituate them through a process of synchronising them with her own bodily rhythms. Hereby the child can establish, in advance, a familiar relationship with the alarming sounds in the ward, enabling her to focus later more on the visit with the relative. The article discusses the proposed design strategy behind this solution and the potentiality for its use in hospital environments in general.
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2016
Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise ... more Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise levels as the main causal explanation for ranking noise as a critical stressor for patients, relatives and staff. Therefore, the most widely used strategies to tackle the problem in practice are insulation and isolation strategies to reduce measurable and perceptual noise levels. However, these strategies do not actively support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is a key element in creating healing environments, according to the paradigm of Evidence-Based Design and Healing Architecture. This article suggests that the gap in contemporary research is intimately linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field, which is incapable of accommodating the multisensory and atmospheric conditions amplifying the experience of noise. This article argues that an attuning approach should be included in the field to help bridge the gap by offering ...
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces - DPPI '13, 2013
This paper presents the concept of Embodied Habituation as an architectural approach to designing... more This paper presents the concept of Embodied Habituation as an architectural approach to designing contextualized technologies. It does so by identifying Middle Ground Experiences acknowledging how spaces are inhabited with ambiguous qualities that affect people emotionally. The research is based on the development and evaluation of Kidkit, which is interactive furniture designed for young children who are going to visit a hospitalized relative with fatal injuries for the first time. Kidkit empowers the child to engage and be present by shaping Middle Ground Experiences in the hospital ward environment that is full of intimidating medical equipment and alarms. The evaluation results indicate collective rewards gained when children succeed in Embodied Habituation. Finally, the paper discusses how Middle Ground Experiences inevitably establish grounds for how we design for spatial experiences within the interaction design community.
Organised Sound, 2015
In this article, we offer an object-oriented ontological perspective to complement the diversity ... more In this article, we offer an object-oriented ontological perspective to complement the diversity of sounding ontologies, challenging the human perspective as the only valid perspective and call for the necessity of including perspectives of objects such as a speakers, voices and light sensors. Subscribing to this view also confronts music and sound art as consistent autonomous categories and focuses on how the pieces attune to the environment, emphasising meetings, transformations and translations through and with other objects. These meetings generate an ecological awareness of causal aesthetics where objectstimeandspaceeach other. This contrasts with traditional analysis of music and sound art, which is based on the assumption that time and space are containers in which sound and music unfold. We analyse two contemporary pieces by the authors in an attempt to unfold a dark ecological1approach to test the implications, limits and potentials for future use and development.
This paper addresses the notion of atmospheres from a designerly perspective, and discusses tempo... more This paper addresses the notion of atmospheres from a designerly perspective, and discusses temporal challenges facing interaction designers when acknowledging the dynamic character of it. As atmospheres are created in the relation between body, space, and time, a pragmatic approach seems useful, in order to encompass dynamic atmospheres as intertwined, constantly shifting negotiations between the rhythms of the environment and of the body. The contribution of this paper is to unravel these negotiations of diverse rhythms, in order to approach dynamic atmospheres from an operational perspective. The potentials and implications are presented through a design case, Kidkit, highlighting temporality as design parametre within interaction design.
Leonardo Music Journal, 2020
In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploratio... more In this article the authors present their sound art project Nephew vs. Overheard as an exploration of a messy, fragile and incoherent local approach to public ecological art, an approach that aims at creating links of affectivity with technological creatures, such as large wind turbines, with which we share our landscape. Supplementing, as well as challenging, the dominant global strategy of ecological art, the authors argue that it is essential to experiment with transductive chains of local environmental data, creating sensibilities that we can relate to in our everyday environments.
Kulturstudier
Den pandemiske periode tydeliggjorde fællesskabernes rodede, skrøbelige og besværlige mellemværen... more Den pandemiske periode tydeliggjorde fællesskabernes rodede, skrøbelige og besværlige mellemværender med lyd. Dét kalder på en ny dialog om vores fælles lydmiljøer. Med et begreb om sonisk medborgerskab udvider artiklen den forståelsesramme for studiet af lyd, der ligger i det klassiske soundscape-begreb som Murray R. Schafer udviklede det. Baseret på eksempler fra pandemiens periode foreslår artiklen, at Schafers idé om at ’stemme verden’ suppleres med en ’afstemmende’ tilgang.
This paper describes the development of a loudness-based compressor for live audio streams. The n... more This paper describes the development of a loudness-based compressor for live audio streams. The need for this device arose while developing the public sound art project The Overheard, which involves mixing together several live audio streams through a web based mixing interface. In order to preserve a natural sounding dynamic image from the varying sound sources that can be played back under varying conditions, an adaptation of the EBU R128 loudness measurement recommendation, originally developed for levelling non-realtime broadcast material, has been applied. The paper describes the Pure Data implementation and the necessary compromises enforced by the live streaming condition. Lastly observations regarding design challenges, related application areas and future goals are presented.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience
Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to p... more Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to prepare children for the alarming atmosphere they will enter when visiting a hospitalised relative. The complex soundscape dominated by alarms and sounds from equipment is mentioned as the main stressor. As a response to this situation, our design artefact, the interactive furniture Kidkit, invites children to become accustomed to the alarming sounds sampled from the ward while they are waiting in the waiting room. Our design acknowledges how atmospheres emerge as temporal negotiations between the rhythms of the body and the environment in conjunction with our internalised perception of the habituated background. By actively controlling the sounds built into Kidkit, the child can habituate them through a process of synchronising them with her own bodily rhythms. Hereby the child can establish, in advance, a familiar relationship with the alarming sounds in the ward, enabling her to focus later more on the visit with the relative. The article discusses the proposed design strategy behind this solution and the potentiality for its use in hospital environments in general.
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, Dec 1, 2016
Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise ... more Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise levels as the main causal explanation for ranking noise as a critical stressor for patients, relatives and staff. Therefore, the most widely used strategies to tackle the problem in practice are insulation and isolation strategies to reduce measurable and perceptual noise levels. However, these strategies do not actively support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is a key element in creating healing environments, according to the paradigm of Evidence-Based Design and Healing Architecture. This article suggests that the gap in contemporary research is intimately linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field, which is incapable of accommodating the multisensory and atmospheric conditions amplifying the experience of noise. This article argues that an attuning approach should be included in the field to help bridge the gap by offering ...
COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy, 2016
The project “Audio Satellites – overhearing everyday life” consists of a number of mobile listeni... more The project “Audio Satellites – overhearing everyday life” consists of a number of mobile listening devices (audio satellites) from which sound is distributed in real time to a server and made available for listening and mixing through a web interface. The audio satellites can either be carried around or displaced arbitrarily in a given landscape. In the web interface, the different sound streams from the individual satellites can be mixed together to form a cooperative soundscape. The project thus allows people to tune into and explore the overheard soundscape of everyday life in a collaborative and creative process of active listening.
In this article, we offer an object-oriented ontological perspective to complement the diversity ... more In this article, we offer an object-oriented ontological perspective to complement the diversity of sounding ontologies, challenging the human perspective as the only valid perspective and call for the necessity of including perspectives of objects such as a speakers, voices and light sensors. Subscribing to this view also confronts music and sound art as consistent autonomous categories and focuses on how the pieces attune to the environment, emphasising meetings, transformations and translations through and with other objects. These meetings generate an ecological awareness of causal aesthetics where objects time and space each other. This contrasts with traditional analysis of music and sound art, which is based on the assumption that time and space are containers in which sound and music unfold. We analyse two contemporary pieces by the authors in an attempt to unfold a dark ecological1 approach to test the implications, limits and potentials for future use and development.
Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to p... more Nurses working in the Neuro-Intensive Care Unit at Aarhus University Hospital lack the tools to prepare children for the alarming atmosphere they will enter when visiting a hospitalised relative. The complex soundscape dominated by alarms and sounds from equipment is mentioned as the main stressor. As a response to this situation, our design artefact, the interactive furniture Kidkit, invites children to become accustomed to the alarming sounds sampled from the ward while they are waiting in the waiting room. Our design acknowledges how atmospheres emerge as temporal negotiations between the rhythms of the body and the environment in conjunction with our internalised perception of the habituated background. By actively controlling the sounds built into Kidkit, the child can habituate them through a process of synchronising them with her own bodily rhythms. Hereby the child can establish, in advance, a familiar relationship with the alarming sounds in the ward, enabling her to focus later more on the visit with the relative. The article discusses the proposed design strategy behind this solution and the potentiality for its use in hospital environments in general.
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Papers by Marie K Højlund