Interactive and Participatory Sound

Whether singing, playing an instrument, or dancing, sound has been interactive through most of human history. While the twentieth century has been dominated by linear media such as radio or sound recording, digital technologies reintroduced interactivity into sound culture, offering a plethora of new ways of interacting with sound. The chapter offers an overview of contemporary research into technological and aesthetic aspects of interactive audio from the fields of sound studies, video game studies, media studies, and, to a lesser extent, music sociology and HCI. It concentrates on three principal domains: While at its most basic level interactive audio involves an interplay of sound and movement, sonic interactions necessarily spill into the broader sociocultural context, progressing from interactivity to participation. The chapter thus furthermore explores the ways material (sensory, spatiotemporal, technological) aspects of sound necessarily influence and are in turn influenced by and reimagined through the social processes of participation, approached as a medium of its own. This dialectic is addressed through a media-ecological approach emphasizing the sonic affordances of interactive media works.