Milena Droumeva | Simon Fraser University (original) (raw)

Papers by Milena Droumeva

Interacting with Computers, 2019

This paper explores an intensity-based approach to sound feedback in systems for embodied learnin... more This paper explores an intensity-based approach to sound feedback in systems for embodied learning. We describe a theoretical framework, design guidelines, and the implementation of and results from an informant workshop. The specific context of embodied activity is considered in light of the challenges of designing meaningful sound feedback, and a design approach is shown to be a generative way of uncovering significant sound design patterns. The exploratory workshop offers preliminary directions and design guidelines for using intensity-based ambient sound display in interactive learning environments. The value of this research is in its contribution towards the development of a cohesive and ecologically valid model for using audio feedback in systems, which can guide embodied interaction. The approach presented here suggests ways that multi-modal auditory feedback can support interactive collaborative learning and problem solving.

We describe two participatory workshops conducted to support design decisions in the making of th... more We describe two participatory workshops conducted to support design decisions in the making of the audio display for an ambient intelligent game platform. The workshops discussed here explore specific issues of players’ interactions with sound and auditory display design. The workshops helped move our design process forward by specifying the role of narrative and sound ecologies in our design. They clarified the role of sound in creating narrative coherence, guiding player actions, and supporting group interaction. We describe the workshops, the auditory display issues we addressed, discuss how the workshops helped inform our subsequent design, and extend recommendations on how participatory workshops can be used by other designers of auditory displays.

While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with... more While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on ‘game construction’ pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing computational literacy in middle and high school students. Essentially, game construction-based curriculum takes the central question “do children learn from playing games” to the next stage by asking “(what) can children learn from constructing games?” Founded on Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning model, and developed over nearly two decades, there is compelling evidence that game construction can increase student confidence and build their capacity towards ongoing computing science involvement and other STEM subjects. Our study adds to the growing body of literature on school-based game construction through comprehensive empirical methodology an...

EDULEARN16 Proceedings, 2016

This paper presents the design and some evaluation results from the auditory display model of an ... more This paper presents the design and some evaluation results from the auditory display model of an ambient intelligent game named socio-ec(h)o. socio-ec(h)o is played physically by a team of four, and displays information via a responsive environment of light and sound. Based on a study of 56 participants involving both qualitative and preliminary quantitative analysis, we present our findings to date as they relate to the auditory display model, future directions and implications. Based on our design and evaluation experience we begin building a theoretical understanding for the unique requirements of informative sonic displays in ambient intelligent and ubiquitous computing systems. We develop and discuss the emerging research concept of aural fluency in ambient intelligent settings.

Computer Games and New Media Cultures, 2012

In the context of diminishing opportunities for music learning in formal education, our team of e... more In the context of diminishing opportunities for music learning in formal education, our team of educational researchers was given the opportunity to create a learning game for the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Toronto, Canada. In this chapter, we document the design and play-testing of a Flash-based Baroque music game, Tafelkids: The Quest for Arundo Donax, focusing on the tensions that arose between the directive to include historical facts about Baroque music and culture on one hand and, on the other, the need to produce opportunities for pleasurable play for an audience aged 8–14. We begin by setting out the concept of “ludic epistemology” in order to situate our design efforts within an emerging pedagogical paradigm, and we review key instances in our design process where we encountered this tension between two very different notions about the relationship of play to learning. Similar tensions arose in our play-testing sessions with over 150 students. We conclude with a discussion of the particular challenges for this educational game in enacting a bridge from propositions to play, digitally remediating a traditional approach to Baroque music education to address the broader epistemological question of what and how we come to know through play.

Media and Communication

Video games are demanding work indeed. So demanding that our screen heroes and heroines are const... more Video games are demanding work indeed. So demanding that our screen heroes and heroines are constantly making sounds of strife, struggle, or victory while conducting surrogate labor for us running, fighting, saving worlds. These sounds also represent the very real demanding labor of voice actors, whose burnout and vocal strain have recently come to the fore in terms of the games industries’ labor standards (Cazden, 2017). But do heroes and she-roes sound the same? What are the demands—virtual, physical, and emotional—of maintaining sexist sonic tropes in popular media; demands that are required of the industry, the game program, and the player alike? Based on participatory observations of gameplay (i.e., the research team engaging with the material by playing the games we study), close reading of gendered sonic presence, and a historical content analysis of three iconic arcade fighting games, this article reports on a notable trend: As games self-purportedly and in the eyes of the w...

This sonic ecology of cities has been highlighted recently by the effects of the global pandemic:... more This sonic ecology of cities has been highlighted recently by the effects of the global pandemic: fewer cars and people on the road are letting quieter layers of the soundscape to come forward, signalling unequivocally that the urban soundscape is a direct result of anthropocenic activity. This is a time, then, to listen and reflect, and perhaps heed new models for thinking of urban sound. One barrier to such a process is the persistent and entrenched disconnect between soundscape literature, public engagement with sound, and urban planning. By critically surveying literature on soundscape assessment as it intersects with cultural sound studies and acoustic ecology, this paper traces a number of important disciplinary ontologies of everyday listening in cities, ranging from attempts to standardise evaluation metrics and classification of soundscapes, to the emergence of subjective listening studies. More recently a ‘digital commons’ approach to civic engagement has led to crowdsourcing sonic experiences, soundmapping, and, at the infrastructural level – networked monitoring of noise levels. These rhetorical and practical developments fit within important contemporary conversations in critical data and algorithm studies and as such require a critical excavation of underlying values and conceptions of listening.

Interacting with Computers, 2019

With an increasing number of everyday operations and communications becoming both automated and a... more With an increasing number of everyday operations and communications becoming both automated and autonomous, ambient intelligent soundscapes are transforming to accommodate additional sonic feedback, and with it, new frameworks of listening. While this type of research and design of audio augmented technology is not new, the impact pre-existing acoustic environments upon listeners’ sense-making activities is rarely considered holistically. Much of the study into the design of effective auditory displays focuses on perceptual acuity and correct source identification, often at the expense of understanding the context of meaning-making. This paper presents a study involving 70 participants who listened to unidentified audio recordings of two archetypal everyday urban sound environments naturally containing artificial signals as well as typical sounds. Using a ThinkAloud protocol we investigated listeners’ approaches to meaning-making in both semantic and temporal dimensions. Through a semantic content analysis, we articulate five aspects of sonic meaning- making: spatial, descriptive, experiential, associational and narrative. We further analyse the use of these perceptual elements on a temporal plane, in order to investigate how listeners construct a narrative of what they hear in real-time, naturally evolving as each subsequent sound event is interpreted. Results suggest that while listeners attend to sound events and spatial characteristics of a sound environment at the beginning of a new listening situation, as the soundscape unfolds they utilize associations and familiarity in order to place individual sounds into increasingly coherent narratives. Finally, we suggest that this approach could provide sound designers and human–computer interaction specialists with a model for investigating the context aspects of a soundscape more holistically, allowing them to evaluate the effect of any new designed sounds prior to introduction into real-world environments.

There is a kind of growing new media practice of capturing and mapping sound and an emergent glob... more There is a kind of growing new media practice of capturing and mapping sound and an emergent global community of listeners interested in engaging with sounds of the environment, urban space, habitats and biospheres. Between user-driven Instagramming our everyday audio-visual experiences and professionally curated sound installations, there is an emergent space and a global audience for listening to ‘soundmaps’ of local and global environments. Sometimes interlinked and sometimes disparate, these communities connect to wider communities of practice and (environmental) activism in the context of social media, new media production and participatory cultures. There are also growing research initiatives that take up soundmapping as a way of inquiring into pressing spatial, geo-political and cultural issues primarily in cities and also in the endangered wilds. Interest in sound in a variety of interdisciplinary fields has grown exponentially over the last few decades. This article will externalize and analyse the frames of several emergent communities and their organizing themes as nascent in new media culture, and social networks specifically, as they intersect with phonography, creative soundmaking and ‘citizen science’ models of collaborative documentary and cultural archiving. By pointing out normative logics embedded in the practice of soundmapping, I then work towards a language of critical soundmapping by way of three examples that I suggest function as alternative forms of representation of and communication about sound environments: (1) the curated initiative Cities and Memory, (2) the creative research project London Sound Survey and (3) the climate change project Biosphere Soundscapes.

In less than a decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a mu... more In less than a decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multimodal, computational ‘smart’ media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement and ubiquity of technological mediation into urban everyday life. This technological mediation is increasingly integrated into and co-constitutive of the very fabric of everyday experience and perception ranging from sensorial encounters with physical space to the enactment of epistemological and social practices. Leveraging a small ethnographic study in which participants used an iPod Touch to generate a series of personal media documentaries about their everyday sonic experience, this paper identifies the act of generating media artefacts is an act of mediated curation: it stages everyday life as content; it reconfigures perceptual practices, and frames patterns of mediated communication. Adopting the metaphor of curation re-frames traditional notions of aesthetic sensibility through concepts such as the ‘photographer’s eye’ and the ‘recordist’s ear’ as they historically transcend the realm of specialized expertise and become the purview of general everyday practice. In that, the boundary between art and documentation is thinly compressed into the simultaneously creative and epistemological act of curating everyday experience through the aesthetic politics of the smartphone. As a sonic ethnography, this study offers a unique model of doing research with technology that is rooted in a sensory approach to subjective experience and the performance of cultural practices.

In this paper we report on a unique and contextually-sensitive approach to sonification of a subs... more In this paper we report on a unique and contextually-sensitive approach to sonification of a subset of climate data: urban air pollution for four Canadian cities. Similarly to other data-driven models for sonification and auditory display, this model details an approach to data parameter mappings, however we specifically consider the context of a public engagement initiative and a reception by an 'everyday' listener, which informs our design. Further, we present an innovative model for FM index-driven sonification that rests on the notion of 'harmonic identities' for each air pollution data parameter sonified, allowing us to sonify more datasets in a perceptually 'economic' way. Finally, we briefly discuss usability and design implications and outline future work.

In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi... more In the last decade, the cell phone’s transformation from a tool for mobile telephony into a multi-modal, computational “smart” media device has engendered a new kind of emplacement, and the ubiquity of technological mediation into the everyday settings of urban life. With it, a new kind of media literacy has become necessary for participation in the networked social publics (Ito; Jenkins et al.). Increasingly, the way we experience our physical environments, make sense of immediate events, and form impressions is through the lens of the camera and through the ear of the microphone, framed by the mediating possibilities of smartphones. Adopting these practices as a kind of new media “grammar” (Burn 29)—a multi-modal language for public and interpersonal communication—offers new perspectives for thinking about the way in which mobile computing technologies allow us to explore our environments and produce new types of cultural knowledge.

An ongoing challenge of 21st century learning is ensuring everyone has the requisite skills to pa... more An ongoing challenge of 21st century learning is ensuring everyone has the requisite skills to participate in a digital, knowledge-based economy. Once an anathema to parents and teachers, digital games are increasingly at the forefront of conversations about ways to address student engagement and provoke challenges to media pedagogies. While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on “game construction” pedagogy as a vehicle for bringing computational literacy to middle and high school students. Founded on Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning model and developed over nearly two decades, there is compelling evidence that game construction can increase confidence and build capacity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This project is a research-based challenge to the by now widely questioned but surprisingly persistent presumption that students in today's classrooms are all by default “digitally native” and that those “digitally native” children are learning just by playing digital games. Through a survey of 60+ students at a largely immigrant middle school in Toronto, Canada, we present some important updates on youth’s media and technology competence and its relationship to baseline knowledge of computer programming and performance in a computational literacy game-based curriculum.

This paper begins with the most obvious, and yet most elusive, of educational media ecologies, th... more This paper begins with the most obvious, and yet most elusive, of educational media ecologies, the buildings which are ‹home› to pedagogic communication and interaction, and considers how we might understand «building as interface», construed first as a noun, («a structure with roof and walls» – OED) referring to places as physical structures, and then as a verb, («the action or trade of constructing something» – OED), referring to the activities of construction through which we can engage technologies central to theory, research and practice. Our concern is with exploring the larger question of educational sustainability: with what ‹sustainability› means when applied to a specifically educational context, and with the sustainability of the kinds of emerging educational environments in which new information and communications technologies play a significant role. This question of sustainable educational environments is driven by a need to be responsible and accountable for the impact of the technologies and practices we eagerly embrace in the name of «21st century learning», even as prospects for a 22nd century are so rapidly receding from view. As one prominent media ecologist put the point: «we have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions» (McLuhan 1967, 124).

Over the last 13 years I have been involved in acoustic ecology, soundwalking, sound design and r... more Over the last 13 years I have been involved in acoustic ecology, soundwalking, sound design and research including writing, producing and thinking through sound. In the past five years I’ve also increasingly questioned the role and lessons of acoustic ecology and in particular its applicability to a contemporary instant-gratification, media-driven ‘networked publics’ (Ito et al., 2012) set in metropolitan contexts filled with urban noise pollution alongside carefully crafted consumer sonification. For those of us in sound studies, urban soundscapes and aural ecologies draw the bulk of our attention; the net is presumed to be ’silent’. But is it? The convergence of ubiquitous mobile computing with active social networking has made the online world a highly sensory-rich place with photos, video and audio snippets being used in place of textual communication. The question is, have the aesthetic politics of the smartphone and social networks made us better able to perceive our surroundings visually and aurally? Where does acoustic ecology fit inside the material conditions of new media culture?

For most of my life, despite myself, I realize I’ve held the notion that school should be tough, ... more For most of my life, despite myself, I realize I’ve held the notion that school should be tough, boring, a character-builder, a secret society club one must prove worthy to enter. Seeing education as a prototyping process has finally allowed me (and thus, will create a space for my students) to have fun, to enjoy, to go on tangents, to push my dubious creativity, and gain confidence in the space between iterations.

In this paper, we argue for cross-pollination between the discourses of cultural studies and phen... more In this paper, we argue for cross-pollination between the discourses of cultural studies and phenomenology in the exploration and description of the embodied relations effected by contemporary digital media. After surveying literatures on both embodiment and cultural studies, specifically those that address auditory experience and the particularities of listening culture, we propose a case for developing a cultural phenomenology of technologically mediated aural practices. This functions as a point of departure for negotiating the notion of embodiment as a culturally contextualised inquiry -one that is reconfigured according to the prevalence and use of contemporary digital media. Some of the main contributions of this work lie in the coalescence of disparate, yet worthwhile and relevant sets of literature, which provide the groundwork for the development of a context sensitive, experientially-oriented ethnography of embodied aurality.

Interacting with Computers, 2019

EDULEARN16 Proceedings, 2016

Computer Games and New Media Cultures, 2012

Media and Communication

Interacting with Computers, 2019

Canadian Communication Annual Conference, 2022

In the past decade, sound studies has transcended its origins in acoustics and musicology, and be... more In the past decade, sound studies has transcended its origins in acoustics and musicology, and become a critical approach to studying civic life in conversation with critical race, media studies, and STS. Theoretical work in sound studies has matured to engage Canadian cultural heritage (as in the works of Dylan Robinson) and decoloniality. As an embodied aspect of communication, sound is a potent starting point for scholarship in urban infrastructure and public space. Not only, as Schafer suggests, can soundscapes signal various power relations, but types of listening and types of listeners have historically been cultivated to fit particular political and economic ideologies. Kate Lacey, among many others, demonstrates how radio as a mass medium, created particular listening publics that can be traced into more modern, online forms, of active and passive communication. Listening, she argues, is always a process with political dimensions. Decolonial listening profoundly resonates with this perspective. As Dylan Robinson reminds us, Canadian musicology, and its reverberations across Canadian heritage today are based on a settler-colonial listening mentality: what we need to do instead, he suggests, is to cultivate positionality in how we approach the sounds and voices of others. Within urban space planning, discourses of civic engagement have highlighted the multi-faceted effects of city infrasrtucture on different populations, especially on marginalized identity groups.

In this panel, we explore the broad concept of sonic citizenship, meaning, the possibility for conscious listening to surrounding environments, as well as the conscious reflection on the listener's positionality, towards both research practice, and interventions in public life. Taking to heart the notion that listening is both individual and communal, this roundtable explore theories and case studies engaging with the idea of sonic citizenship. The key questions we explore are:
How do we listen positionally in research? How do we translate critiques of sound studies into research guidelines?
How do we create possibilities for both human and non-human listening positions in policy and planning?
What does decolonial listening look like for non-indigenous researchers?