Sound environments, real and virtual, are pervasive in our daily lives. Recent analytical studies have impacted diverse areas of the human condition such as anthropology, ecology, education, security, urban planning, and the continuous archival and retrieval of personal experience. Synthetic sound environments, immersive and interactive, are becoming increasingly prominent in the auditory display community, in our quest to understand complex data sets regarding the human genome, global climate change, and many other areas of the human condition. As well, the pervasiveness of distributed/social media platforms poses new challenges in terms of retrieval, navigation, and other types of interaction with very large databases of environmental sound recordings. Indeed, the acquisition, processing, retrieval, and synthesis of environmental sounds are often problems that cannot be separated any more within the emerging set of applications. Knowledge in these areas must be brought together in a transdisciplinary manner, for truly integrated solutions to emerge. For instance, it may be possible to improve the ability of auditory displays to handle data of greater size and complexity by a greater understanding of how humans perceive and structure sound environments holistically via active exploration of the acoustic space. Unfortunately, most of this knowledge has traditionally been confined to the quite disparate realms of ecological (Gibsonian) perception (psychology, HCI) and acoustic ecology (music, anthropology) and has so far contributed little to auditory display. Such knowledge, in terms of new representational frameworks, may also facilitate large-scale computational auditory scene analysis and information retrieval, particularly in terms of bridging “semantic gaps” in these disciplines. With this special issue we will establish an international forum for researchers to share original contributions in these areas and will particularly favor integrative and transdisciplinary approaches. Original research articles will be supplemented with a number of invited tutorial articles and other summary contributions. Sample topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Microphone array techniques for environmental sound acquisition
- Environmental sound segmentation and source separation
- Computational auditory scene analysis
- Computational acoustic ecology
- Continuous archival and retrieval of personal experience via sound
- Immersive sound in embodied interaction design
- Methods for retrieval from environmental sound databases (content-based, semantic, user-activity-based)
- Applications in human activity analysis
- Applications in geographic information systems
- Applications in gaming, mixed-reality, and the arts
- Case studies (ecology, urban planning, architecture, and related fields) that embed a computational schema
Before submission, authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/asmp/guidelines.html. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:
Manuscript Due January 15, 2010
First Round of Reviews April 15, 2010
Publication Date July 15, 2010
Lead Guest Editor
- Harvey Thornburg, Electrical Engineering/Arts, Media, and Engineering, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ 85212, USA
Guest Editors
- Stefania Serafin, Department of Medialogy, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Andrea Valle, Department of Fine Arts, Music and Performative Arts, School of Multimedia, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
