To engage students in and beyond course activities has been a working practice both at KTH Sound and Music Computing group and at KMH Royal College of Music since many years. This paper collects experiences of involving students in research conducted within the two institutions.  We describe how students attending our courses are given the possibility to be involved in our research activities, and we argue that their involvement both contributes to develop new research and benefits the students in the short and long term.  Among the assignments, activities, and tasks we offer in our education programs are pilot experiments, prototype development, public exhibitions, performing, composing, data collection, analysis challenges, and bachelor and master thesis projects that lead to academic publications.

This paper presents a study on the composition of haptic music for a multisensory installation and how composers could be aided by a preparatory workshop focusing on the perception of whole-body vibrations prior to such a composition task. Five students from a Master’s program in Music Production were asked to create haptic music for the installation Sound Forest. The students were exposed to a set of different sounds producing whole-body vibrations through a wooden platform and asked to describe perceived sensations for respective sound. Results suggested that the workshop helped the composers successfully complete the composition task and that awareness of haptic possibilities of the multisensory installation could be improved through training. Moreover, the sounds used as stimuli provided a relatively wide range of perceived sensations, ranging from pleasant to unpleasant. Considerable intra-subject differences motivate future large-scale studies on the perception of whole-body vibrations in artistic music practice.

Sound Forest is a music installation consisting of a room with light-emitting interactive strings, vibrating platforms and speakers, situated at the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts. In this paper we present an exploratory study focusing on evaluation of Sound Forest based on picture cards and interviews. Since Sound Forest should be accessible for everyone, regardless age or abilities, we invited children, teens and adults with physical and intellectual disabilities to take part in the evaluation. The main contribution of this work lies in its fndings suggesting that multisensory platforms such as Sound Forest, providing whole-body vibrations, can be used to provide visitors of diferent ages and abilities with similar associations to musical experiences. Interviews also revealed positive responses to haptic feedback in this context. Participants of diferent ages used diferent strategies and bodily modes of interaction in Sound Forest, with activities ranging from running to synchronized music-making and collaborative play.

Sonification using audio parameter mapping involves both aesthetic and technical challenges and requires interdisciplinary skills on a high level to produce a successful result. With the aim to lower the barrier for students to enter the field of sonification, we developed and presented WebAudioXML at SMC2020. Since then, more than 40 student projects has successfully proven that the technology is highly beneficial for non-programmers to learn how to create interactive web audio applications. With this study, we present new feature for WebAudioXML that also makes advanced audio parameter mapping, data interpolation and value conversion more accessible and easy to assess. Three student projects act as base for the syntax definition and by using an annotated portfolio and video recorded interviews with experts from the sound and music computing community, we present important insights from the project. The participants contributed with critical feedback and questions that helped us to better understand the strengths and weaknesses with the proposed syntax. We conclude that the technology is robust and useful and present new ideas that emerged from this study.

Web technologies in general and Web Audio API in particular have a great potential as a learning platform for developing interactive sound and music applications. Earlier studies at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm have led to a wide range of student projects but have also indicated that there is a high threshold for novice programmers to understand and use Web Audio API. We developed the WebAudioXML coding environment to solve this problem, and added a statistics module to analyze student works. The current study is the first presentation and evaluation of the technology. Three classes of students with technical repsectively artistic background participated through online courses by building interactive, sound-based applications. We analysed the source code and self-reflective reports from the projects to understand the impact WebAudioXML has on creativity and the learning process. The results indicate that WebAudioXML can be a useful platform for teaching and learning how to build online audio applications. The platform makes mapping between user interactions and audio parameters accessible for novice programmer and supports artists in successfully realizing their design ideas. We show that templates can be a great help for the students to get started but also a limitation for them to expand ideas beyond the presented scope.

Creating an effective sonification is a challenging task that requires skills and knowledge on an expertise level in several disciplines. This study contributes with WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit (WAST) that aims at reaching new groups who have not yet considered themselves to be part of the ICAD community. We have designed, built, and evaluated the toolkit by analysing ten student projects using it and conclude that WAST did meet our expectations and that it lead to students taking a deep approach to learning and successfully contributed to reaching the learning outcomes. The result indicates that WAST is both easy-to-use, highly accessible, extensively flexible and offers possibilities to share the sonification in any device’s web browser simply through a web link, and without installations. We also suggest that a sonification toolkit would become an even more creative environment with virtual instruments and mixing features typically found in Digital Audio Workstations.

This study presents a sonification tool – SonifyFOLK – designed for intuitive access by musicians and dancers in their sonic explorations of movements in dance performances. It is implemented as a web-based application to facilitate accessible audio parameter mapping of movement data for non-experts, and applied and evaluated with Swedish folk musicians and dancers in their exploration of sonifying dance. SonifyFOLK is based on the WebAudioXML Sonification Toolkit and is designed within a group of artists and engineers using artistic goals as drivers for the sound design. The design addresses challenges of providing an accessible interface for mapping movement data to audio parameters, managing multi-dimensional data and creating audio mapping templates for a contextually grounded sound design. The evaluation documents a diversity of sonification outcomes, reflections by participants that imply curiosity for further work on sonification, as well as the importance of the immediacy of the both visual and acoustic feedback of parameter choices.